



,0 » " * ' 






: - ( D 



. .*«' 



v o^ 



riA* o^^^^^ a>«* 1 "5s 






o ...... o- 







"ot; 



° d 



A ^ 








.0° *+ *^., 










♦^ -. 







4 






■*o* 











y J 






v oV* 
















9 •!••* ^ V 




^' 




















^6* 







Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/mysecondyearofwa01palm 



^o* 



MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 



BOOKS BY FREDERICK PALMER 

Going to War in Greece 

The Ways of the Service 

The Vagabond 

With Kuroki in Manchuria 

Over the Pass 

The Last Shot 

My Year of the Great War 

The Old Blood 

My Second Year of the War 



MY SECOND YEAR 
OF THE WAR 



BY 

FREDERICK PALMER 

'Author of " The Last Shot," " The Old Blood," " My Year 
of the Great War," etc. 




NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 

1917 



336-^0 



Copyright, 1917 
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY. Inc. 



*/£2 



FEB 27 19!? 



©CLA455725 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I Back to the Front i 

II Verdun and Its Sequel 18 

III A Canadian Innovation 35 

IV Ready for the Blow 50 

V The Blow 67 

VI First Results of the Somme 81 

VII Out of the Hopper of Battle 94 

VIII Forward the Guns ! ......... 108 

IX When the French Won 119 

X Along the Road to Victory 130 

XI The Brigade that Went Through . . . .142 

XII The Storming of Contalmaison 153 

XIII A Great Night Attack 167 

XIV The Cavalry Goes In . 180 

XV Enter the Anzacs 190 

XVI The Australians and a Windmill .... 201 

XVII The Hateful Ridge 213 

XVIII A Truly French Affair 236 

XIX On the Aerial Ferry 244 

XX The Ever Mighty Guns 255 

XXI By the Way 269 

XXII The Mastery of the Air . 282 

XXIII A Patent Curtain of Fire 292 

XXIV Watching a Charge 304 

XXV Canada Is Stubborn 319 

XXVI The Tanks Arrive 332 

XXVII The Tanks in Action 348 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XXVIII Canada Is Quick 360 

XXIX The Harvest of Villages 374 

XXX Five Generals and Verdun 385 

XXXI Au Revoir, Somme! 400 



MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 



MY SECOND YEAR OF 
THE WAR 

i 

BACK TO THE FRONT 

How America fails to realize the war — Difficulties of realization — 
Uncle Sam is sound at heart — In London again — A Chief of 
Staff who has risen from the ranks — Sir William Robertson takes 
time to think — At the front — Kitchener's mob the new army — A 
quiet headquarters — Sir Douglas Haig — His office a clearing 
house of ideas — His business to deal in blows— "The Spirit 
that quickeneth." 

" I've never kept up my interest so long in anything 
as in this war," said a woman who sat beside me at 
dinner when I was home from the front in the 
winter of 19 15-16. Since then I have wondered if 
my reply, " Admirable mental concentration ! " was 
not ironic at the expense of manners and philosophy. 
In view of the thousands who were dying in battle 
every day, her remark seemed as heartless as it was 
superficial and in keeping with the riotous joy of 
living and prosperity which strikes every returned 
American with its contrast to Europe's self-denial, 
emphasized by such details gained by glimpses in 



2 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

the shop windows of Fifth Avenue as the exhibit 
of a pair of ladies' silk hose inset with lace, price 
one hundred dollars. 

Meanwhile, she was knitting socks or mufflers, I 
forget which, for the Allies. Her confusion about 
war news was common to the whole country, which 
heard the special pleading of both sides without any 
cross-questioning by an attorney. She remarked 
how the Allies' bulletins said that the Allies were 
winning and the German bulletins that the Germans 
were winning; but so far as she could see on the 
map the armies remained in much the same positions 
and the wholesale killing continued. Her interest, 
I learned on further inquiry, was limited and par- 
tisan. When the Germans had won a victory, she 
refused to read about it and threw down her paper 
in disgust. 

There was something human in her attitude, as 
human as the war itself. It was a reminder of how 
far away from the Mississippi is the Somme; how 
broad is the Atlantic; how impossible it is to pro- 
ject yourself into the distance even in the days of 
the wireless. She was moving in the orbit of her 
affairs, with its limitations, just as the soldiers were 
in theirs. Before the war luxury was as common in 
Paris as in New York; but with so ghastly a struggle 
proceeding in Europe it seemed out of keeping that 
the joy of living should endure anywhere in the 



BACK TO THE FRONT 3 

world. Yet Europe was tranquilly going its way 
when the Southern States were suffering pain and 
hardship worse than any that France and England 
have known. Paris and London were dining and 
smiling when Richmond was in flames. 

War can be brought home to no community until 
its own sons are dying and risking death. In noth- 
ing are we so much the creatures of our surround- 
ings as in war. For the first few weeks when I was 
at home, a nation going its way in an era of pros- 
perity had an aspect of vulgarity; peace itself was 
vulgar by contrast with the atmosphere of heroic 
sacrifice in which I. had lived for over a year. I 
asked myself if my country could ever rise to the 
state of exaltation of France and England. Though 
first thought, judging by superficial appearances 
alone, might have said " No," I knew that we could 
if there ever came a call to defend our soil — a call 
that could be brought home to the valleys of the 
Hudson and the Mississippi as a call was brought 
home to the valleys of the Somme, the Meuse and 
the Marne. 

Many Americans had returned from Europe with 
reports of humiliation endured as a result of their 
country's attitude. Shopkeepers had made insulting 
remarks, they said, and in some instances had refused 
to sell goods. They had been conscious of hostility 
under the politeness of their French and English 



4 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

friends. A superficial confirmation of their conten- 
tion might be taken from the poster I noticed on 
my way from Paddington Station to my hotel upon 
my arrival in England. It advertised an article in 
a cheap weekly under the title of " Uncle Sham." 

I took this just as seriously as I took a cartoon in 
a New York evening paper of pro-German tend- 
encies on the day that I had sailed from New York, 
which showed John Bull standing idly by and urging 
France on to sacrifices in the defense of Verdun. It 
was as easy for an American to be indignant at one 
as for an Englishman at the other, but a little 
unworthy of the intelligence of either. I was too 
convinced that Uncle Sam, who does not always fol- 
low my advice, is sound at heart and a respectable 
member of the family of nations to be in the least 
disturbed in my sense of international good will. If 
I had been irritated I should have contributed to 
the petty backbiting by the mischievous uninformed 
which makes bad blood between peoples. 

I knew, too, from experience, as I had kept re- 
peating at home, that when the chosen time arrived 
for the British to strike, they would prove with deeds 
the shamelessness of this splash of printer's ink and 
confound, as they have on the Somme, the witticism 
of a celebrated Frenchman who has since made his 
apology for saying that the British would fight on 
till the last drop of French blood was shed. Besides, 



BACK TO THE FRONT 5 

on the same day that I saw the poster I saw in 
a British publication a reproduction of a German 
cartoon — exemplifying the same kind of vulgar 
facility — picturing Uncle Sam being led by the nose 
by John Bull. 

Thinking Englishmen and Frenchmen, when they 
pause in their preoccupation of giving life and for- 
tune for their cause to consider this extraneous sub- 
ject, realize the widespread sympathy of the United 
States for the Allied cause and how a large propor- 
tion of our people were prepared to go to war after 
the sinking of the Lusitania for an object which 
could bring them no territorial reward. If we will 
fight only for money and aggrandizement, as the 
" Uncle Sham " style of reasoners hold, we should 
long ago have taken Mexico and Central America. 
Personally, I have never had anyone say to me that 
I was " too proud to fight," though if I went about 
saying that I was ashamed of my country I might; 
for when I think of my country I think of no group 
of politicians, financiers, or propagandists, no 
bureaucracy or particular section of opinion, but of 
our people as a whole. But unquestionably we were 
unpopular with the masses of Europeans. A sen- 
tence taken out of its context was misconstrued into 
a catch-phrase indicating the cravenness of a nation 
wedded to its flesh-pots, which pretended a moral 
superiority to others whose passionate sacrifice made 



6 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

them supersensitive when they looked across the 
Atlantic to the United States, which they saw profit- 
ing from others' misfortunes. 

By living at home I had gained perspective about 
the war and by living with the war I have gained 
perspective about my own country. At the front I 
was concerned day after day with the winning of 
trenches and the storming of villages whose names 
meant as little in the Middle West as a bitter fight 
for good government in a Western city meant to the 
men at the front. After some months of peace upon 
my return to England I resented passport regula- 
tions which had previously been a commonplace; 
but soon I was back in the old groove, the groove of 
war, with war seeming as normal in England as 
peace seemed in the United States. 

In London, recruiting posters with their hectic 
urgings to the manhood of England to volunteer no 
longer blanketed the hoardings and the walls of 
private buildings. Conscription had come. Every 
able-bodied man must now serve at the command of 
the government. England seemed to have greater 
dignity. The war was wholly master of her proud 
individualism, which had stubbornly held to its 
faith that the man who fought best was he who 
chose to fight rather than he who was ordered to 
fight. 

There was a new Chief of Staff at the War Office, 



BACK TO THE FRONT 7 

Sir William Robertson, who had served for seven 
years as a private before he received his commission 
as an officer, singularly expressing in his career the 
character of the British system, which leaves open to 
merit the door at the head of a long stairway which 
calls for hard climbing. England believes in men 
and he had earned his way to the direction of the 
most enormous plant with the largest personnel 
which the British Empire had ever created. 

It was somewhat difficult for the caller to compre- 
hend the full extent of the power and responsibility 
of this self-made leader at his desk in a great room 
overlooking Whitehall Place, for he had so sim- 
plified an organization that had been brought into 
being in two years that it seemed to run without any 
apparent effort on his part. The methods of men 
who have great authority interest us all. I had first 
seen Sir William at a desk in a little room of a house 
in a French town when his business was that of 
transport and supply for the British Expeditionary 
Force. Then he moved to a larger room in the same 
town, as Chief of Staff of the army in France. Now 
he had a still larger one and in London. 

I had heard much of his power of application, 
which had enabled him to master languages while 
he was gaining promotion step by step ; but I found 
that the new Chief of Staff of the British Army was 
not " such a fool as ever to overwork," as one of his 



8 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

subordinates said, and no slave to long hours of 
drudgery at his desk. 

" Besides his routine," said another subordinate, 
speaking of Sir William's method, " he has to do a 
great deal of thinking." This passing remark was 
most illuminating. Sir William had to think for the 
whole. He had trained others to carry out his plans, 
and as former head of the Staff College who had 
had experience in every branch, he was supposed to 
know how each branch should be run. 

When I returned to the front, my first motor trip 
which took me along the lines of communication re- 
vealed the transformation, the more appreciable be- 
cause of my absence, which the winter had wrought. 
The New Army had come into its own. And I had 
seen this New Army in the making. I had seen 
Kitchener's first hundred thousand at work on Salis- 
bury Plain under old, retired drillmasters who, how- 
ever eager, were hazy about modern tactics. The 
men under them had the spirit which will endure 
the drudgery of training. With time they must learn 
to be soldiers. More raw material, month after 
month, went into the hopper. The urgent call of 
the recruiting posters and the press had, in the earlier 
stages of the war, supplied all the volunteers which 
could be utilized. It took much longer to prepare 
equipment and facilities than to get men to enlist. 
New Army battalions which reached the front in 



BACK TO THE FRONT 9 

August, 19 1 5, had had their rifles only for a month. 
Before rifles could be manufactured rifle plants had 
to be constructed. As late as December, 19.15, the 
United States were shipping only five thousand rifles 
a week to the British. Soldiers fully drilled in the 
manual of arms were waiting for the arms with 
which to fight; but once the supply of munitions 
from the new plants was started it soon became a 
flood. 

All winter the New Army battalions had been ar- 
riving in France. With them had come the com- 
plicated machinery which modern war requires. 
The staggering quantity of it was better proof than 
figures on the shipping list of the immense tonnage 
which goes to sea under the British flag. The old 
life at the front, as we knew it, was no more. When 
I first saw the British Army in France it held seven- 
teen miles of line. Only seventeen, but seventeen 
in the mire of Flanders, including the bulge of the 
Ypres salient. 

By the first of January, 19 15, a large proportion 
of the officers and men of the original Expeditionary 
Force had perished. Reservists had come to take 
the vacant places. Officers and non-commissioned 
officers who survived had to direct a fighting army 
in the field and to train a new army at home. An 
offensive was out of the question. All that the 
force in the trenches could do was to hold. When 



io MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

the world wondered why it could not do more, those 
who knew the true state of affairs wondered how 
it could do so much. With flesh and blood infantry 
held against double its own numbers supported by 
guns firing five times the number of British shells. 
The British could not confess their situation without 
giving encouragement to the Germans to press 
harder such attacks as those of the first and second 
battle of Ypres, which came perilously near suc- 
ceeding. 

This little army would not admit the truth even in 
its own mind. With that casualness by which the 
Englishman conceals his emotions the surviving of- 
ficers of battalions which had been battered for 
months in the trenches would speak of being " top 
dog, now." While the world was thinking that the 
New Army would soon arrive to their assistance, 
they knew as only trained soldiers can know how 
long it takes to make an army out of raw material. 
So persistent was their pose of winning that it hyp- 
notized them into conviction. As it had never oc- 
curred to them that they could be beaten, so they 
were not. 

If sometimes the logic of fact got the better of 
simulation, they would speak of the handicap of 
fighting an enemy who could deliver blows with the 
long reach of his guns to which they could not re- 
spond. But this did not happen often. It was a 



BACK TO THE FRONT n 

part of the game for the German to marshal more 
guns than they if he could. They accepted the sit- 
uation and fought on. They, too, looked forward 
to " the day," as the Germans had before the war; 
and their day was the one when the New Army 
should be ready to strike its first blow. 

There was also a new leader in France, king of 
the British world there. Sir William sent him the 
new battalions and the guns and the food for men 
and guns and his business was to make them into 
an army. They arrived thinking that they were al- 
ready one, as they were against any ordinary foe, 
though not yet in homogeneity of organization 
against a foe that had prepared for war for forty 
years and on top of this had had two years' experi- 
ence in actual battle. 

On a quiet byroad near headquarters town, where 
all the staff business of General Headquarters was 
conducted, a wisp of a flag hung at the entrance to 
the grounds of a small modern chateau. There 
seemed no place in all France more isolated and 
tranquil, its size forbidding many guests. It was 
such a house as some quiet, studious man might 
have chosen to rest in during his summer holiday. 
The sound of the guns never reached it; the rumble 
of army transport was unheard. 

Should you go there to luncheon you would be 
received by a young aide who, in army jargon, was 



12 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

known as a " crock "; that is, he had been invalided 
as the result of wounds or exposure in the trenches 
and, though unfit for active service, could still serve 
as aide to the Commander-in-Chief. At the ap- 
pointed minute of the hour, in keeping with mili- 
tary punctuality, whether of generals or of curtains 
of fire, a man with iron-gray hair, clear, kindly eyes, 
and an unmistakably strong chin, came out of his 
office and welcomed the guests with simple informal- 
ity. He seemed to have left business entirely behind 
when he left his desk. You knew him at once for 
the type of well-preserved British officer who never 
neglects to keep himself physically fit. It amounts 
to a talent with British officers to have gone through 
campaigns in India and South Africa and yet al- 
ways to appear as fresh as if they had never known 
anything more strenuous than the leisurely life of 
an English country gentleman. 

I had always heard how hard Sir Douglas Haig 
worked, just as I had heard how hard Sir William 
Robertson worked. Sir Douglas, too, showed no 
signs of pressure, and naturally the masterful con- 
trol of surroundings without any seeming effort is 
a part of the equipment of military leaders. The 
power of the modern general is not evident in any 
of the old symbols. 

It was really the army that chose Sir Douglas 
to be Commander-in-Chief. Whenever the possi- 



BACK TO THE FRONT 13 

bility of the retirement of Sir John French was men- 
tioned and you asked an officer who should take his 
place, the answer was always either Robertson or 
Haig. In any profession the members should be the 
best judges of excellence in that profession, and 
through eighteen months of organizing and fighting 
these two men had earned the universal praise of 
their comrades in arms. Robertson went to Lon- 
don and Haig remained in France. England looked 
to them for victory. 

Birth was kind to Sir Douglas. He came of an 
old Scotch family with fine traditions. Oxford fol- 
lowed almost as a matter of course for him and 
afterward he went into the army. From that day 
there is something in common between his career 
and Sir William's, simple professional zeal and in- 
dustry. They set out to master their chosen calling. 
Long before the public had ever heard of either one 
their ability was known to their fellow soldiers. No 
two officers were more averse to any form of public 
advertisement, which was contrary to their instincts 
no less than to the ethics of soldiering. In South 
Africa, which was the practical school where the 
commanders of the British Army of to-day first 
learned how to command, their efficient staff work 
singled them out as coming men. Both had vision. 
They studied the continental systems of war and 
when the great war came they had the records which 



14 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

were the undeniable recommendation that singled 
them out from their fellows. Sir John French and 
Sir Ian Hamilton belonged to the generation ahead 
of them, the difference being that between the '50s 
and the '60s. 

It was the test of command of a corps and after- 
ward of an army in Flanders and Northern France 
which made Sir Douglas Commander-in-Chief, a test 
of more than the academic ability which directs chess- 
men on the board: that of the physical capacity to 
endure the strain of month after month of cam- 
paigning, to keep a calm perspective, never to let 
the mastery of the force under you get out of hand 
and never to be burdened with any details except 
those which are vital. 

The subordinate who went in an uncertain mood 
to see either Sir Douglas or Sir William left with 
a sense of stalwart conviction. Both had the gift 
of simplifying any situation, however complex. 
When a certain general became unstrung during the 
retreat from Mons, Sir Douglas seemed to consider 
that his first duty was to assist this man to recover 
composure, and he slipped his arm through the 
general's and walked him up and down until com- 
posure had returned. Again, on the retreat from 
Mons Sir Douglas said, " We must stay here for the 
present, if we all die for it," stating this military 
necessity as coolly as if it merely meant waiting 



BACK TO THE FRONT 15 

another quarter-hour for the arrival of a guest to 
dinner. 

No less than General Joffre, Sir Douglas lived by- 
rule. He, too, insisted on sleeping well at night 
and rising fresh for his day's work. During the 
period of preparation for the offensive his routine 
began with a stroll in the garden before breakfast. 
Then the heads of the different branches of his staff 
in headquarters town came in turn to make their 
reports and receive instructions. At luncheon very 
likely he might not talk of war. A man of his edu- 
cation and experience does not lack topics to take 
his mind off his duties. Every day at half-past two 
he went for a ride and with him an escort of his 
own regiment of Lancers. The rest of the after- 
noon was given over to conferences with subordinates 
whom he had summoned. On Sunday morning he 
always went into headquarters town and in a small, 
temporary wooden chapel listened to a sermon from 
a Scotch dominie who did not spare its length in 
awe of the eminent member of his congregation. 
Otherwise, he left the chateau only when he went to 
see with his own eyes some section of the front or 
of the developing organization. 

Of course, the room in the chateau which was his 
office was hung with maps as the offices of all the 
great leaders are, according to report. It seems the 
most obvious decoration. Whether it was the latest 



1 6 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

photograph from an aeroplane or the most recent 
diagram of plans of attack, it came to him if his 
subordinates thought it worth while. All rivers of 
information flowed to the little chateau. He and the 
Chief of Staff alone might be said to know all that 
was going on. Talking with him in the office, which 
had been the study of a French country gentleman, 
one gained an idea of the things which interested 
him; of the processes by which he was building up 
his organization. Fie was the clearing house of all 
ideas and through them he was setting the criterion 
of efficiency. He spoke of the cause for which he 
was fighting as if this were the great thing of all 
to him and to every man under him, but without 
allowing his feelings to interfere with his judgment 
of the enemy. His opponent was seen without il- 
lusion, as soldier sees soldier. To him his problem 
was not one of sentiment, but of military power. 
He dealt in blows; and blows alone could win the 
war. 

Simplicity and directness of thought, decision and 
readiness to accept responsibility, seemed second na- 
ture to the man secluded in that little chateau, free 
from any confusion of detail, who had a task — the 
greatest ever fallen to the lot of a, British com- 
mander — of making a raw army into a force which 
could undertake an offensive against frontal posi- 
tions considered impregnable by many experts and 



BACK TO THE FRONT 17 

occupied by the skilful German Army. He had, in 
common with Sir William Robertson, " a good deal 
of thinking to do "; and what better place could he 
have chosen than this retreat out of the sound of 
the guns, where through his subordinates he felt the 
pulse of the whole army day by day? 

His favorite expression was " the spirit that 
quickeneth " ; the spirit of effort, of discipline, of the 
fellowship of cohesion of organization — spreading 
out from the personality at the desk in this room 
down through all the units to the men themselves. 
Though officers and soldiers rarely saw him they 
had felt the impulse of his spirit soon after he had 
taken command. A new era had come in France. 
That old organization called the British Empire, 
loose and decentrated — and holding together be- 
cause it was so — had taken another step forward in 
the gathering of its strength into a compact force. 



II 

VERDUN AND ITS SEQUEL 

German grand strategy and Verdun — Why the British did not go 
to Verdun — What they did to help — Racial characteristics in 
armies — Father Joffre a miser of divisions — The Somme country 
— Age-old tactics — If the flank cannot be turned can the front 
be broken? — Theory of the Somme offensive. 

In order properly to set the stage for the battle of 
the Somme, which was the corollary of that of 
Verdun, we must, at the risk of appearing to thresh 
old straw, consider the German plan of campaign in 
19 1 6 when the German staff had turned its eyes 
from the East to the West. During the summer of 
19 1 5 it had attempted no offensive on the Western 
front, but had been content to hold its solid trench 
lines in the confidence that neither the British nor 
the French were prepared for an offensive on a large 
scale. 

Blue days they were for us with the British Army 
in France during July and early August, while the 
official bulletins revealed on the map how von Hin- 
denburg's and von Mackensen's legions were driving 
through Poland. More critical still the subsequent 
period when inside information indicated that Ger- 
man intrigue in Petrograd, behind the Russian lines 



VERDUN AND ITS SEQUEL 19 

which the German guns were pounding, might suc- 
ceed in making a separate peace. Using her in- 
terior lines for rapid movement of troops, enclosed 
by a steel ring and fighting against nations speaking 
different languages with their capitals widely sep- 
arated and their armies not in touch, each having 
its own sentimental and territorial objects in the war, 
the obvious object of Germany's policy from the 
outset would be to break this ring, forcing one of 
the Allies to capitulate under German blows. 

In August, 1 9 14, she had hoped to win a decisive 
battle against France before she turned her legions 
against Russia for a decision. Now she aimed to 
accomplish at Verdun what she had failed to accom- 
plish on the Marne, confident in her information that 
France was exhausted. It was von Hindenburg's 
turn to hold the thin line while the Germans concen- 
trated on the Western front twenty-six hundred thou- 
sand men, with every gun that they could spare and 
all the munitions that had accumulated after the 
Russian drive was over. The fall of Paris was un- 
necessary to their purpose. Capitals, whether Paris, 
Brussels, or Bucharest, are only the trophies of mili- 
tary victory. Primarily the German object, which 
naturally included the taking of Verdun, was to 
hammer at the heart of French defense until France, 
staggering under the blows, her morale broken by 
the loss of the fortress, her supposedly mercurial 



20 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

nature in the depths of depression, would surrender 
to impulse and ask for terms. 

After the German attacks began at Verdun all 
the world was asking why the British, who were 
holding only sixty-odd miles of line at the time and 
must have large reserves, did not rush to the relief 
of the French. The French people themselves were 
a little restive under what was supposed to be British 
inaction. Army leaders could not reveal their plans 
by giving reasons — the reasons which are now obvi- 
ous—for their action or inaction. To some unmili- 
tary minds the situation seemed as simple as if Jones 
were attacked on the street by Smith and Robinson, 
while Miller, Jones' friend who was a block away, 
would not go to his rescue. To others, perhaps a 
trifle more knowing, it seemed only a matter of 
marching some British divisions across country or 
putting them on board a train. 

Of course the British were only too ready to as- 
sist the French. Any other attitude would have 
been unintelligent; for, with the French Army 
broken, the British Army would find itself having 
to bear unassisted the weight of German blows in 
the West. There were three courses which the Brit- 
ish Army might take. 

First. It could send troops to Verdun. But the 
mixture of units speaking different languages in the 
intricate web of communications required for direct- 



VERDUN AND ITS SEQUEL 21 

ing modern operations, and the mixture of transport 
in the course of heavy concentrations in the midst 
of a critical action where absolute cohesion of all 
units was necessary, must result in confusion which 
would make any such plan impracticable. Only the 
desperate situation of the French being without re- 
serves could have compelled its second considera- 
tion, as it represented the extreme of that military 
inefficiency which makes wasteful use of lives and 
material. 

Second. The British could attack along their 
front as a diversion to relieve pressure on Verdun. 
For this the Germans were fully prepared. It fell 
in exactly with their plan. Knowing that the British 
New Army was as yet undeveloped as an instrument 
for the offensive and that it was still short of guns 
and shells, the Germans had struck in the inclement 
weather of February at Verdun, thinking, and 
wrongly to my mind, that the handicap to the vital- 
ity of their men of sleet, frost and cold, soaking 
rains would be offset by the time gained. Not only 
had the Germans sufficient men to carry on the Ver- 
dun offensive, but facing the British their num- 
bers were the largest mile for mile since the first 
battle of Ypres. Familiar with British valor as the 
result of actual contact in battle from Mons to the 
Marne and back to Ypres, and particularly in the 
Loos offensive (which was the New Army's first 



22 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

"eye-opener" to the German staff), the Germans 
reasoned that, with what one German called the 
courage of their stupidity, or the stupidity of their 
courage," the British, driven by public demand to 
the assistance of the French, would send their fresh 
infantry with inadequate artillery support against 
German machine guns and curtains of fire, and pile 
up their dead until their losses would reduce the 
whole army to inertia for the rest of the year. 

Of course, the German hypothesis — the one which 
cost von Falkenhayn his place as Chief of Staff — was 
based on such a state of exhaustion by the French 
that a British attack would be mandatory. The 
initial stage of the German attack was up to expecta- 
tions in ground gained, but not in prisoners or ma- 
terial taken. The French fell back skilfully before 
the German onslaught against positions lightly held 
by the defenders in anticipation of the attack, and 
turned their curtains of fire upon the enemy in pos- 
session of captured trenches. Then France gave to 
the outside world another surprise. Her spirit, ever 
brilliant in the offensive, became cold steel in a 
stubborn and thrifty defensive. She was not 
" g ro ggy)" as the Germans supposed. For every 
yard of earth gained they had to pay a ghastly 
price ; and their own admiration of French shell and 
valor is sufficient professional glory for either Pe- 
tain, Nivelle, or Mangin, or the private in the ranks. 



VERjDUN AND ITS SEQUEL 23 

Third. The British could take over more trench 
line, thus releasing French forces for Verdun, which 
was the plan adopted at the conference of the 
French and British commands. One morning in 
place of a French army in Artois a British army 
was in occupation. The round helmets of the Brit- 
ish took the place of the oblong helmets of the 
French along the parapet; British soldiers were in 
billets in place of the French in the villages at 
the rear and British guns moved into French gun- 
emplacements with the orderly precision which army 
training with its discipline alone secures; while the 
French Army was on board railway trains moving 
at given intervals of headway over rails restricted to 
their use on their way to Verdun where, under that 
simple French staff system which is the product of 
inheritance and previous training and this war's ex- 
perience, they fell into place as a part of the wall of 
men and cannon. 

Outside criticism, which drew from this arrange- 
ment the conclusion that it left the British to the 
methodical occupation of quiet trenches while their 
allies were sent to the sacrifice, had its effect for a 
time on the outside public and even on the French, 
but did not disturb the equanimity of the British 
staff in the course of its preparations or of the 
French staff, which knew well enough that when the 
time came the British Army would not be fastidious 



24 MY SECOND YEAk OF THE WAR 

about paying the red cost of victory. Four months 
later when British battalions were throwing them- 
selves against frontal positions with an abandon that 
their staff had to restrain, the same sources of out- 
side criticism, including superficial gossip in Paris, 
were complaining that the British were too brave 
in their waste of life. It has been fashionable with 
some people to criticize the British, evidently under 
the impression that the British New Army would be 
better than a continental army instantly its battalions 
were landed in France. 

Every army's methods, every staff's way of think- 
ing, are characteristic in the long run of the people 
who supply it with soldiers. The German Army is 
what it is not through the application of any aca- 
demic theory of military perfection, but through the 
application of organization to German character. 
Naturally phlegmatic, naturally disinclined to initia- 
tive, the Germans before the era of modern Ger- 
many had far less of the martial instinct than the 
French. German army makers, including the master 
one of all, von Moltke, set out to use German 
docility and obedience in the creation of a machine 
of singular industry and rigidity and ruthless disci- 
pline. Similar methods would mean revolt in demo- 
cratic France and individualistic England where 
every man carries Magna Charta, talisman of his 
own " rights," in his waistcoat pocket. 



VERDUN AND ITS SEQUEL 25 

The French peasant, tilling his fields within range 
of the guns, the market gardener bringing his prod- 
ucts down the Somme in the morning to Amiens, or 
the Parisian clerk, business man and workman — 
they are France and the French Army. But the 
heart-strength and character-strength of France, I 
think, is her stubborn, conservative, smiling peasant. 
It is repeating a commonplace to say that he always 
has a few gold pieces in his stocking. He yields one 
only on a critical occasion and then a little grum- 
blingly, with the thrift of the bargainer who means 
that it shall be well spent. 

The Anglo-Saxon, whose inheritance is particu- 
larly evident in Americans in this respect, when he 
gives in a crisis turns extravagant whether of money 
or life, as England has in this war. The sea is his 
and new lands are his, as they are ours. Aus- 
tralians with their dollar and a half a day, buying 
out the shops of a village when they were not in 
the trenches, were astounding to the natives though 
not in the least to themselves. They were acting 
like normal Anglo-Saxons bred in a rich island con- 
tinent. Anglo-Saxons have money to spend and 
spend it in the confidence that they will make more. 

General Joffre, grounded in the France of the 
people and the soil, was a thrifty general. Indeed, 
from the lips of Frenchmen in high places the Ger- 
mans might have learned that the French Army was 



26 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

running short of men. Joffre seemed never to have 
any more divisions to spare ; yet never came a crisis 
that he did not find another division in the toe of 
his stocking, which he gave up as grumblingly as 
the peasant parts with his gold piece. 

A miser of divisions, Father Joffre. He had 
enough for Verdun as we know — and more. While 
he was holding on the defensive there, he was able 
to prepare for an offensive elsewhere. He spared 
the material and the guns to cooperate with the Brit- 
ish on the Somme and later he sent to General Foch, 
commander of the northern group of French Armies, 
the unsurpassed Iron Corps from Nancy and the fa- 
mous Colonial Corps. 

It was in March, 191 6, when suspense about Ver- 
dun was at its height, that Sir Douglas Haig, Com- 
mander-in-Chief of the group of British Armies, 
and Sir Henry Rawlinson, who was to be his right- 
hand man through the offensive as commander of 
the Fourth Army, went over the ground opposite the 
British front on the Somme and laid the plans for 
their attack, and Sir Henry received instructions to 
begin the elaborate preparations for what was to 
become the greatest battle of all time. It included, 
as the first step, the building of many miles of rail- 
way and highway for the transport of the enormous 
requisite quantities of guns and materials. 

The Somme winds through rich alluvial lands at 



VERDUN AND ITS SEQUEL 27 

this point and around a number of verdant islands 
in its leisurely course. Southward, along the old 
front line, the land is more level, where the river 
makes its bend in front of Peronne. Northward, 
generically, it rises into a region of rolling country, 
with an irregularly marked ridge line which the 
Germans held. 

No part of the British front had been so quiet in 
the summer of 191 5 as the region of Picardy. From 
the hill where later I watched the attack of July 1st, 
on one day in August of the previous year I had such 
a broad view that if a shell were to explode any- 
where along the front of five miles it would have 
been visible to me, and I saw not a single burst of 
smoke from high explosive or shrapnel. Appar- 
ently the Germans never expected to undertake any 
offensive here. All their energy was devoted to 
defensive preparations, without even an occasional 
attack over a few hundred yards to keep in their 
hand. Tranquillity, which amounted to the simula- 
tion of a truce, was the result. At different points 
you might see Germans walking about in the open 
and the observer could stand exposed within easy 
range of the guns without being sniped at by artil- 
lery, as he would have been in the Ypres salient. 

When the British took over this section of line, 
so short were they of guns that they had to depend 
partly on French artillery; and their troops were 



28 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

raw New Army battalions or regulars stiffened by 
a small percentage of veterans of Mons and Ypres. 
The want of guns and shells required correspond- 
ingly more troops to the mile, which left them still 
relying on flesh and blood rather than on machinery 
for defense. The British Army was in that middle 
stage of a few highly trained troops and the first 
arrival of the immense forces to come; while the 
Germans occupied on the Eastern front were not of 
a mind to force the issue. There is a story of 
how one day a German battery, to vary the monot- 
ony, began shelling a British trench somewhat heav- 
ily. The British, in reply, put up a sign, " If you 
don't stop we will fire our only rifle grenade 
at you! " to which the Germans replied in the same 
vein, " Sorry! We will stop " — as they did. 

The subsoil of the hills is chalk, which yields to 
the pick rather easily and makes firm walls for 
trenches. Having chosen their position, which they 
were able to do in the operations after the Marne 
as the two armies, swaying back and forth in the 
battle for positions northward, came to rest, the 
Germans had set out, as the result of experience, to 
build impregnable works in the days when forts had 
become less important and the trench had become 
supreme. As holding the line required little fight- 
ing, the industrious Germans under the stiff bonds 
of discipline had plenty of time for sinking deep 



VERDUN AND ITS SEQUEL 29 

dugouts and connecting galleries under their first 
line and for elaborating their communication 
trenches and second line, until what had once been 
peaceful farming land now consisted of irregular 
welts of white chalk crossing fields without hedges or 
fences, whose sweep had been broken only by an 
occasional group of farm buildings of a large pro- 
prietor, a plot of woods, or the village communities 
where the farmers lived and went to and from their 
farms which were demarked to the eye only by the 
crop lines. 

One can never make the mistake of too much sim- 
plification in the complicated detail of modern tac- 
tics where the difficulty is always to see the .forest 
for the trees. Strategy has not changed since pre- 
historic days. It must always remain the same : 
feint and surprise. The first primitive man who 
looked at the breast of his opponent and struck sud- 
denly at his face was a strategist; so, too, the an- 
thropoid at the Zoo who leads another to make 
a leap for a trapeze and draws it out from under 
him ; so, too, the thug who waits to catch his victim 
coming unawares out of an alley. Anybody facing 
more than one opponent will try to protect his back 
by a wall, which is also strategy — strategy being the 
veritable instinct of self-preservation which aims at 
an advantage in the disposition of forces. 

Place two lines of fifty men facing each other in 



30 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

the open without officers, and some fellow with ini- 
tiative on the right or the left end will instinctively 
give the word and lead a rush for cover somewhere 
on the flank which will permit an enfilade of the 
enemy's ranks. Practically all of the great battles of 
the world have been won by turning an enemy's 
flank, which compelled him to retreat if it did not 
result in rout or capture. 

The swift march of a division or a brigade from 
reserve to the flank at the critical moment has often 
turned the fortune of a day. All maneuvering has 
this object in view. Superior numbers facilitate the 
operation, and victory has most often resolved itself 
into superior numbers pressing a flank and nothing 
more ; though subsequently his admiring countrymen 
acclaimed the victor as the inventor of a strategic 
plan which was old before Alexander took the field, 
when the victor's genius consisted in the use of op- 
portunities that enabled him to strike at the critical 
point with more men than his adversary. In flank 
of the Southern Confederacy Sherman swung 
through the South; in flank the Confederates aimed 
to bend back the Federal line at Kulp's Hill and 
Little Round Top. By the flank Grant pressed Lee 
back to Appomattox. Yalu, Liao Yang and Muk- 
den were won in the Russo-Japanese war by flank- 
ing movements which forced Kuropatkin to retire, 
though never disastrously. 



VERDUN AND ITS SEQUEL 31 

Pickett's charge at Gettysburg remains to the 
American the most futile and glorious illustration 
of a charge against a frontal position, with its en- 
deavor to break the center. The center may waver, 
but it is the flanks that go ; though, of course, in all 
consistent operations of big armies a necessary inci- 
dent of any effort to press back the wings is suffi- 
cient pressure on the front, simultaneously delivered, 
to hold all the troops there in position and keep the 
enemy command in apprehension of the disaster that 
must follow if the center were to break badly at the 
same time that his flanks were being doubled back. 
The foregoing is only the repetition of principles 
which cannot be changed by the length of line 
and masses of troops and incredible volumes of 
artillery lire; which makes the European war the 
more confusing to the average reader as he receives 
his information in technical terms. 

The same object that leads one line of men to try 
to flank another sent the German Army through 
Belgium in order to strike the French Army in flank. 
It succeeded in this purpose, but not in turning the 
French flank; though by this operation, in violation 
of the territory of a neutral nation, it made enemy 
territory the scene of future action. One may dis- 
cuss until he is blue in the face what would have 
happened if the Germans had thrown their legions 
directly against the old French frontier. Personally, 



32 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

in keeping with the idea that I expressed in " The 
Last Shot," I think that they would never have gone 
through the Trouee de Miracourt or past Verdun. 

With a solid line of trenches from Switzerland 
to the North Sea, any offensive must " break the 
center," as it were, in order to have room for a 
flanking operation. It must go against frontal posi- 
tions, incorporating in its strategy every defensive 
lesson learned and the defensive tactics and weapons 
developed in eighteen months of trench warfare. If, 
as was generally supposed, the precision of modern 
arms, with rifles and machine guns sending their 
bullets three thousand yards and curtains of fire de- 
livered from hidden guns anywhere from two to 
fifteen miles away, was all in favor of the defensive, 
then how, when in the days of muzzle-loading rifles 
and smooth-bore guns frontal attacks had failed, 
could one possibly succeed in 19 16? 

Again and again in our mess and in all of the 
messes at the front, and wherever men gathered the 
world over, the question, Can the line be broken? 
has been discussed. As discussed it is an academic 
question. The practical answer depends upon the 
strength of the attacking force compared to that of 
the defending force. If the Germans could keep 
only five hundred thousand men on the Western 
front they would have to withdraw from a part of 
the line, concentrate on chosen positions and depend 



VERDUN AND ITS SEQUEL 33 

on tactics to defend their exposed flanks in pitched 
battle. Three million men, with ten thousand guns, 
could not break the line against an equally skilful 
army of three millions with ten thousand guns; but 
five millions with fifteen thousand guns might break 
the line held by an equally skilful army of a million 
with five thousand guns. Thus, you are brought 
to a question of numbers, of skill and of material. 
If the object be attrition, then the offensive, if it 
can carry on its attacks with less loss of men than 
the defensive, must win. With the losses about 
equal, the offensive must also eventually win if it 
has sufficient reserves. 

There could be no restraining the public, with 
the wish father to the thought, from believing that 
the attack of July 1st on the Somme was an effort 
at immediate decision, though the responsible staff 
officer was very careful to state that there was no 
expectation of breaking the line and that the object 
was to gain a victory in morale, train the army in 
actual conditions for future offensives, and, when 
the ledger was balanced, to prove that, with superior 
gunfire, the offensive could be conducted with less 
loss than the defensive under modern conditions. 
This, I think, may best be stated now. The results 
we shall consider later. 

One thing was certain, with the accruing strength 
of the British and the French Armies, they could not 



34 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

rest idle. They must attack. They must take the 
initiative away from the Germans. The greater the 
masses of Germans which were held on the Western 
front under the Allied pounding, the better the situa- 
tion for the Russians and the Italians; and, accord- 
ingly, the plan for the summer of 191 6 for the first 
time permitted all the Allies, thanks to increased 
though not adequate munitions — there never can be 
that — to conduct something like a common offensive. 
That of the Russians, starting earlier than the others, 
was the first to pause, which meant that the Anglo- 
French and the Italian offensives were in full blast, 
while the Russians, for the time being, had settled 
into new positions. 

Preparation for this attack on the Somme, an 
operation without parallel in character and magni- 
tude unless it be the German offensive at Verdun 
which had failed, could not be too complete. There 
must be a continuous flow of munitions which would 
allow the continuation of the battle with blow upon 
blow once it had begun. Adequate realization of 
his task would not hasten a general to undertake it 
until he was fully ready, and military preference, if 
other considerations had permitted, would have 
postponed the offensive till the spring of 19 17. 



Ill 

A CANADIAN INNOVATION 

Gathering of the clans from Australia, New Zealand and Canada 
— England sends Sir Douglas Haig men but not an array — 
Methods of converting men into an army — The trench raid a 
Canadian invention — Development of trench raiding — The 
correspondents' quarters — Getting ready for the " big push " — 
A well-kept secret. 

11 Some tough! " remarked a Canadian when he saw 
the Australians for the first time marching along a 
French road. They and the New Zealanders were 
conspicuous in France, owing to their felt hats with 
the brim looped up on the side, their stalwart 
physique and their smooth-shaven, clean-cut faces. 
Those who had been in Gallipoli formed the stiffen- 
ing of veteran experience and comradeship for those 
fresh from home or from camps in Egypt. 

Canadian battalions, which had been training in 
Canada and then in England, increased the Canadian 
numbers until they had an army equal in size to that 
of Meade or Lee at Gettysburg. English, Scotch, 
Welsh, Irish, South Africans and Newfoundlanders 
foregathering in Picardy, Artois and Flanders left 
one wondering about English as " she is spoke." On 
the British front I have heard every variety, includ- 

35 



36 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

ing that of different parts of the United States. 
One day I received a letter from a fellow country- 
man which read like this : 

" I'm out here in the R.F.A. with ' krumps ' 
bursting on my cocoanut and am going to see it 
through. If you've got any American newspapers 
or magazines lying loose please send them to me, 
as I am far from California." 

The clans kept arriving. Every day saw new bat- 
talions and new guns disembark. England was 
sending to Sir Douglas Haig men and material, but 
not an army in the modern sense. He had to weld 
the consignments into a whole there in the field in 
face of the enemy. Munitions were a matter of 
resource and manufacturing, but the great factory 
of all was the factory of men. It was not enough 
that the gunners should know how to shoot fairly 
accurately back in England, or Canada, or Aus- 
tralia. They must learn to cooperate with scores 
of batteries of different calibers in curtains of fire 
and, in turn, with the infantry, whose attacks they 
must support with the finesse of scientific calculation 
plus the instinctive liaison which comes only with 
experience under trained officers, against the German 
Army which had no lack of material in its con- 
script ranks for promotion to fill vacancies in the 
officers' lists. 

From seventeen miles of front to twenty-seven, 



A CANADIAN INNOVATION 37 

and then to sixty and finally to nearly one hundred, 
the British had broadened their responsibility, which 
meant only practice in the defensive, while the Ger- 
mans had had two years' practice in the offensive. 
The two British offensives at Neuve Chapelle had 
included a small proportion of the battalions which 
were to fight on the Somme; and the third, incom- 
parably more ambitious, faced heavier concentration 
of troops and guns than its predecessors. 

What had not been gained in battle practice must 
be approximated in drill. Every battalion com- 
mander, every staff officer and every general who 
had had any experience, must be instructor as well 
as director. They must assemble their machine and 
tune it up before they put it on a stiffer road than 
had been tried before. 

The British Army zone in France became a school 
ground for the Grand Offensive ; and while the peo- 
ple at home were thinking, " We've sent you the 
men and the guns — now for action ! " the time of 
preparation was altogether too short for the indus- 
trious learners. Every possible kind of curriculum 
which would simulate actual conditions of attack had 
been devised. In moving about the rear the rattle 
of a machine gun ten miles back of the line told of 
the machine gun school; a series of explosions drew 
attention to bombers working their way through 
practice trenches in a field; a heavier explosion was 



38 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

from the academy for trench mortars; a mighty 
cloud of smoke and earth rising two or three 
hundred feet was a new experiment in mining. 
Sir Douglas went on the theory that no soldier can 
know his work too well. He meant to allow no man 
in his command to grow dull from idleness. 

Trench warfare had become systematized, and in- 
evitably the holding of the same line for month 
after month was not favorable to the development of 
initiative. A man used to a sedentary life is not 
given to physical action. One who is always dig- 
ging dugouts is loath to leave the habitation which 
has cost him much labor in order to live in the open. 

Battalions were in position for a given number of 
days, varying with the character of the position held, 
when they were relieved for a rest in billets. While 
in occupation they endured an amount of shell fire 
varying immensely between different sectors. A few 
men were on the watch with rifles and machine guns 
for any demonstration by the enemy, while the rest 
were idle when not digging. They sent out patrols 
at night into No Man's Land for information; ex- 
changed rifle grenades, mortars and bombs with the 
enemy. Each week brought its toll of casualties, 
light in the tranquil places, heavy in the wickedly hot 
corner of the Ypres salient, where attacks and 
counter-attacks never ceased and the apprehension 
of having your parapet smashed in by an artillery 



A CANADIAN INNOVATION 39 

" preparation," which might be the forerunner of 
an attack, was unremittingly on the nerves. 

It was a commonplace that any time you desired 
you could take a front of a thousand or two yards 
simply by concentrating your gunfire, cutting the 
enemy's barbed wire and tearing the sandbags of 
his parapet into ribbons, with resulting fearful 
casualties to him; and then a swift charge under 
cover of the artillery hurricane would gain posses* 
sion of the debris, the enemy's wounded and 
those still alive in his dugouts. Losses in opera- 
tions of this kind usually were much lighter in taking 
the enemy's position than in the attempt to hold it, 
as he, in answer to your offensive, turned the full 
force of his guns upon his former trench which your 
men were trying to organize into one of their own. 
Later, under cover of his own guns, his charge recov- 
ered the ruins, forcing the party of the first part who 
had started the " show " back to his own former 
first line trench, which left the situation as it was 
before with both sides a loser of lives without gain- 
ing any ground and with the prospect of drudgery 
in building anew their traverses and burrows and 
filling new sandbags. 

It was the repetition of this sort of " incident," 
as reported in the daily communiques, which led the 
outside world to wonder at the fatuousness and the 
satire of the thing, without understanding that its 



4 o MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

object was entirely for the purpose of morale. An 
attack was made to keep the men up to the mark; 
a counter-attack in order not to allow the enemy ever 
to develop a sense of superiority. Every soldier 
who participated in a charge learned something in 
method and gained something in the quality consid- 
ered requisite by his commanders. He had met face 
to face in mortal hand-to-hand combat in the trench 
traverses the enemy who had been some invisible 
force behind a gray line of parapet sniping at him 
every time he showed his head. 

Attack and counter-attack without adding another 
square yard to the territory in your possession — 
these had cost hundreds of thousands of casualties on 
the Western front. The next step was to obtain the 
morale of attack without wasting lives in trying to 
hold new ground. 

Credit for the trench raid, which was developed 
through the winter of 191 5, belongs to the Cana- 
dian. His plan was as simple as that of the American 
Indian who rushed a white settlement and fled after 
he was through scalping; or the cowboys who shot 
up a town; or the Mexican insurgents who descend 
upon a village for a brief visit of killing and looting. 
The Canadian proposed to enter the German 
trenches by surprise, remain long enough to make 
the most of the resulting confusion, and then to 
return to his own trenches without trying to hold 



A CANADIAN INNOVATION 41 

and organize the enemy's position and thus draw 
upon his head while busy with the spade a murder- 
ous volume of shell fire. 

The first raids were in small parties over a narrow 
front and the tactics those of the frontiersman, who 
never wants in individual initiative and ground- 
craft. Behind their lines the Canadians rehearsed 
in careful detail again and again till each man was 
letter perfect in the part that he was to play in the 
" little surprise being planned in Canada for Brother 
Boche." The time chosen for the exploit was a 
dark, stormy night, when the drumbeat of rain and 
the wind blowing in their direction would muffle the 
movements of the men as they cut paths through the 
barbed wires for their panther-like rush. It was 
the kind of experiment whose success depends upon 
every single participant keeping silence and perform- 
ing the task set for him with fastidious exactitude. 

The Germans, confident in the integrity of their 
barbed wire, with all except the sentries whose ears 
and eyes failed to detect danger asleep in their dug- 
outs, found that the men of the Maple Leaf had 
sprung over the parapet and were at the door de- 
manding surrender. It was an affair to rejoice 
the heart of Israel Putnam or Colonel Mosby, 
and its success was a new contribution in tactics to 
stalemate warfare which seemed to have exhausted 
every possible invention and novelty. Trench raids 



42 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

were made over broader and broader fronts until 
they became considerable operations, where the wire 
was cut by artillery which gave the same kind of 
support to the men that it was to give later on in the 
Grand Offensive. 

There was a new terror to trench holding and 
dwelling. Now the man who lay down in a dugout 
for the night was not only in danger of being blown 
heavenward by a mine, or buried by the explosion of 
a heavy shell, or compelled to spring up in answer 
to the ring of the gong which announced a gas at- 
tack, but he might be awakened at two a.m. (a 
favorite hour for raids) by the outcry of sentries 
who had been overpowered by the stealthy rush of 
shadowy figures in the night, and while he got to 
his feet be killed by the burst of a bomb thrown by 
men whom he supposed were also fast asleep in their 
own quarters two or three hundred yards away. 

Trench-raid rivalry between battalions, which 
commanders liked to instil, inevitably developed. 
Battalions grew as proud of their trench raids as 
battleships of their target practice. A battalion 
which had not had a successful trench raid had 
something to explain. What pride for the Bantams 
— the little fellows below regulation height who 
had enlisted in a division of their own on Lord 
Kitchener's suggestion — when in one of their trench 
raids they brought back some hulking, big Germans 



A CANADIAN INNOVATION 43 

and a man's size German machine gun across No 
Man's Land ! 

Raiders never attempted to remain long in the 
enemy's trenches. They killed the obdurate Ger- 
mans, took others prisoners and, aside from the 
damage that they did, always returned with 
identifications of the battalions which occupied the 
position, while the prisoners brought in yielded 
valuable information. 

The German, more adaptive than creative, more 
organizing than pioneering, was not above learning 
from the British, and soon they, too, were under- 
taking surprise parties in the night. Although they 
tightened the discipline for the defensive of both 
sides, trench raids were of far more service to 
the British than to the Germans; for the British 
staff found in them an invaluable method of prepara- 
tion for the offensive. Not only had the artillery 
practice in supporting actual rather than theoretical 
attacks, but when the men went over the parapet it 
was in face of the enemy, who might turn on his 
machine guns if not silenced by accurate gunfire. 
They learned how to coordinate their efforts, 
whether individually or as units, both in the charge 
and in cleaning out the German dugouts. Their 
sense of observation, adaptability and team play was 
quickened in the life-and-death contact with the foe. 

Through the spring months the trench raids con- 



44 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

tinued in their process of " blooding " the new army 
for the " big push." Meanwhile, the correspond- 
ents, who were there to report the operations of the 
army, were having as quiet a time as a country gen- 
tleman on his estate without any of the cares of his 
superintendent. 

Our homing place from our peregrinations about 
the army was not too far away from headquarters 
town to be in touch with it or too near to feel the 
awe of proximity to the directing authority of hun- 
dreds of thousands of men. Trench raids had lost 
their novelty for the public which the correspondents 
served. A description of a visit to a trench was as 
commonplace to readers as the experience itself to 
one of our seasoned group of six men. We had seen 
all the schools of war and the Conscientious Ob- 
jectors' battalion, too — those extreme pacifists who 
refuse to kill their fellow man. Their opinions 
being respected by English freedom and individual- 
ism, they were set to repairing roads and like tasks. 

The war had become completely static. Unless 
some new way of killing developed, even the Eng- 
lish public did not care to read about its own army. 
When my English comrades saw that a petty scandal 
received more space in the London papers than their 
accounts of a gallant air raid, they had moments of 
cynical depression. 

Between journeys we took long walks, went birds'- 



A CANADIAN INNOVATION 45 

nesting and chatted with the peasants. What had 
we to do with war? Yet we never went afield to 
trench or headquarters, to hospital or gun position, 
without finding something new and wonderful to us 
if not to the public in that vast hive of military- 
industry. 

" But if we ever start the push they'll read every 
detail," said our wisest man. " It's the push that 
is in everybody's mind. The man in the street is 
tired of hearing about rehearsals. He wants the 
curtain to go up." 

Each of us knew that the offensive was coming 
and where, without ever speaking of it in our mess 
or being supposed to know. Nobody was supposed 
to know, except a few " brass hats " in headquarters 
town. One of the prime requisites of the gold braid 
which denotes a general or of the red band around 
the cap and the red tab on the coat lapel which 
denote staff is ability to keep a secret; but long 
association with an army makes it a sort of second 
nature, even with a group of civilians. When you 
met a Brass Hat you pretended to believe that the 
monotony of those official army reports about shell- 
ing a new German redoubt or a violent artillery duel, 
or four enemy planes brought down, which read the 
same on Friday as on Thursday, was to continue 
forever. The Brass Hats pretended to believe the 
same among themselves. For all time the British 



46 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

and the French Armies were to keep on hurling ex- 
plosives at the German Army from the same posi- 
tions. 

Occasionally a Brass Hat did intimate that the 
offensive would probably come in the spring of 19 17, 
if not later, and you accepted the information as 
strictly confidential and indefinite, as you should ac- 
cept any received from a Brass Hat. It never oc- 
curred to anybody to inquire if " 19 17 " meant June 
or July of 19 1 6. This would be as bad form as to 
ask a man whose head was gray last year and is 
black this year if he dyed his hair. 

Those heavy howitzers, fresh from the foundry, 
drawn by big caterpillar tractors, were all proceed- 
ing in one direction — toward the Somme. Villages 
along their route were filling with troops. The 
nearer the front you went, the greater the concen- 
tration of men and material. Shells, the size of 
the milk cans at suburban stations, stood in close 
order on the platforms beside the sidings of new 
light railways; shells of all calibers were piled at 
new ammunition dumps; fields were cut by the tracks 
of guns moving into position; steam rollers were 
road-making in the midst of the long processions of 
motor trucks, heavy laden when bound toward the 
trenches and empty when returning; barbed- wire 
enclosures were ready as collecting stations for pris- 
oners; clusters of hospital tents at other points 



A CANADIAN INNOVATION 47 

seemed out of proportion to the trickle of wounded 
from customary trench warfare. 

All this preparation, stretching over weeks and 
months, unemotional and methodical, infinite in de- 
tail, prodigious in effort, suggested the work of en- 
gineers and contractors and subcontractors in the 
building of some great bridge or canal, with the 
workmen all in the same kind of uniform and with 
managers, superintendents and foremen each having 
some insignia of rank and the Brass Hats and Red 
Tabs the inspectors and auditors. 

The officer installing a new casualty clearing sta- 
tion, or emplacing a gun, or starting another ammuni- 
tion dump, had not heard of any offensive. He 
was only doing what he was told. It was not his 
business to ask why of any Red Tab, any more 
than it was the business of a Red Tab to ask why 
of a Brass Hat, or his business to know that the 
same sort of thing was going on over a front of 
sixteen miles. Each one saw only his little section 
of the hive. Orders strictly limited workers to their 
sections at the same time that their lips were sealed. 
Contractors were in no danger of strikes ; employees 
received no extra pay for overtime. It was as evi- 
dent that the offensive was to be on the Somme as 
that the circus has come to town, when you see tents 
rising at dawn in a vacant lot while the elephants are 
standing in line. 



48 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

Toward the end of June I asked the Red Tab 
who sat at the head of our table if I might go to 
London on leave. He was surprised, I think, but 
did not appear surprised. It is one of the requisites 
of a Red Tab that he should not. He said that he 
was uncertain if leave were being granted at present. 
This was unusual, as an intimation of refusal had 
never been made on any previous occasion. When I 
said that it would be for only two or three days, he 
thought that it could be arranged all right. What 
this considerate Red Tab meant was that I should 
return " in time." Yet he had not mentioned that 
there was to be any offensive and I had not. We 
had kept the faith of military secrecy. Besides, I 
really did not know, unless I opened a pigeonhole 
in my brain. It was also my business not to know — 
the only business I had with the " big push " except 
to look on. 

Over in London my friends surprised me by ex- 
claiming, " What are you doing here ? " and, " Won't 
you miss the offensive which is about to begin?" 
Now, what would a Brass Hat say in such an awk- 
ward emergency? Would he look wise or unwise 
when he said it? Trying to look unwise, I replied: 
V They have the men now and can strike any time 
that they please. It's not my place to know where 
or when. I asked for leave and they gave it." I 
was quite relieved and felt that I was almost worthy 



A CANADIAN INNOVATION 49 

of a secretive Brass Hat myself, when one man 
remarked : " They don't let you know much, do 
they?" 

To keep such immense preparations wholly a 
secret among any English-speaking people would be 
out of the question. Only the Japanese are mentally 
equipped for security of information. With other 
races it is a struggling effort. Can you imagine 
Washington keeping a military secret? You could 
hear the confidential whispers all the way from the 
War Department to the Capitol. In such a great 
movement as that of the Somme one weak link in a 
chain of tens of thousands of officers is enough to 
break it, not to mention a million or so of privates. 



IV 



READY FOR THE BLOW 

French national spirit — Our gardeners — Tuning up for the attack — 
Policing the sky — Sausage balloons — Matter-of-fact, systematic 
war — A fury of trench raids — Reserves marching forward — 
Organized human will — Sons of the old country ready to 
strike — The greatest struggle of the war about to begin. 

Our headquarters during my first summer at the 
front had been in the flat border region of the Pas 
de Calais, which seemed neither Flanders nor 
France. Our second summer required that we 
should be nearer the middle of the British line, as 
it extended southward, in order to keep in touch 
with the whole. In the hilly country of Artois a less 
comfortable chateau was compensated for by the 
smiling companionship of neighbors in the fields and 
villages of the real France. 

The quality of this sympathetic appeal was that 
of the thoroughbred racial and national spirit of a 
great people, in the politeness which gave to a 
thickset peasant woman a certain grace, in the smiles 
of the land and its inhabitants, in that inbred patri- 
otism which through the centuries has created a 
distinctive civilization called French by the same 
ready sacrifices for its continuity as those which 

50 



READY FOR THE BLOW 51 

were made on the Marne and at Verdun. Flanders 
is not France, and France is increasingly French as 
you proceed from Ypres to Amiens, the capital of 
Picardy. I was glad that Picardy had been chosen as 
the scene of the offensive. It made the blow seem 
more truly a blow for France. I was to learn to 
love Picardy and its people under the test of battle. 
In order that we might be near the field of the 
Somme we were again to move our quarters, and 
we had the pang of saying good-by to another 
garden and another gardener. All the gardeners 
of our different chateaux had been philosophers. It 
was Louis who said that he would like to make all 
the politicians who caused wars into a salad, accom- 
panying his threat with appropriate gestures; 
Charles who thought that once the " Boches " were 
properly pruned they might be acceptable second- 
rate members of international society; and Leon 
who wanted the Kaiser put to the plow in a coat of 
corduroy as the best cure for his conceit. That 
afternoon, when an revoirs were spoken and our 
cars wound in and out over the byroads of the 
remote countryside, not a soldier was visible until 
we came to the great main road, where we had the 
signal that peaceful surroundings were finally left 
behind in the distant, ceaseless roar of the guns, 
like some gigantic drumbeat calling the armies to 
combat. 



52 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

A giant with nerves of telephone wires and mus- 
cles of steel and a human heart seemed to be snarl- 
ing his defiance before he sprang into action. We 
knew the meaning of the set thunders of the pre- 
liminary bombardment. That night to the eastward 
the sky was an aurora borealis of flashes; and the 
next day we sought the source of the lightnings. 

Seamed and tracked and gashed were the slopes 
behind the British line and densely peopled with 
busy men in khaki. Every separate scene was 
familiar to us out of our experience, but every one 
had taken on a new meaning. The whole exerted 
a majestic spell. Graded like the British social 
scale were the different calibers of guns. Those 
with the largest reach were set farthest back. 
Fifteen-inch howitzer dukes or nine-inch howitzer 
earls, with their big, ugly mouths and their delib- 
erate and powerful fire, fought alone, each in his 
own lair, whether under a tree or in the midst of 
the ruins of a village. The long naval guns, though 
of smaller caliber, had a still greater reach and were 
sending their shells five to ten miles beyond the 
German trenches. 

The eight-inch and six-inch howitzers were more 
gregarious. They worked in groups of four and 
sometimes a number of batteries were in line. Be- 
yond them were those alert commoners, the field 
guns, rapid of fire with their eighteen-pound shells. 



READY FOR THE BLOW S3 

These seemed more tractable and companionable, 
better suited for human association, less mechanically 
brutal. They were not monstrous enough to require 
motor tractors to draw them at a stately gait, but 
behind their teams could be up and away across 
the fields on short notice, their caissons of ammuni- 
tions creaking behind them. Along the communica- 
tion trenches perspiring soldiers carried " plum pud- 
dings " or the trench-mortar shells which were to 
be fired from the front line and boxes of egg- 
shaped bombs which fitted nicely in the palm of the 
hand for throwing. 

It seemed that all the guns in the world must be 
firing as you listened from a distance, although when 
you came into the area where the guns were in tiers 
behind the cover of a favorable slope you found 
that many were silent. The men of one battery 
might be asleep while its neighbor was sending 
shells with a one-two-three deliberation. Any sleep 
or rest that the men got must be there in the midst 
of this crashing babel from steel throats. Again, 
the covers were being put over the muzzles for the 
night, or, out of what had seemed blank hillside, a 
concealed battery which had not been firing before 
sent out its vicious puffs of smoke before its reports 
reached your ears. Every battery was doing as it 
was told from some nerve-center ; every one had its 
registered target on the map — a trench, or a road, 



54 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

or a German battery, or where it was thought that 
a German battery ought to be. 

The flow of ammunition for all came up steadily, 
its expenditure regulated on charts by oflicers who 
kept watch for extravagance and aimed to make 
every shell count. A fortune was being fired away 
every hour; a sum which would send a youth for 
a year to college or bring up a child went into a 
single large shell which might not have the luck to 
kill one human being as excuse for its existence ; an 
endowment for a maternity hospital was represented 
in a day's belch of destruction from a single acre of 
trodden wheat land. One trench mortar would 
consume in an hour plum puddings for an orphan 
school. For you might pause to think of it in this 
way if you chose. Thousands do at the front. 

Down on the banks of the Somme the blue uni- 
forms of the French in place of the British khaki 
hovered around the gun-emplacements ; the soixante- 
quinze with its virtuoso artistic precision was neighbor 
to the British eighteen-pounder. Guns, guns, guns — ■ 
French and English! The same nests of them op- 
posite Gommecourt and at Estrees thundered across 
at one another from either bank of the Somme 
through summer haze over the green spaces of the 
islands edged with the silver of its tranquil flow in 
the moonlight or its glare in the sunlight. 

Not the least of the calculations in this activity 



READY FOR THE BLOW 55 

was to screen every detail from aerial observation. 
New hangars had risen at the edge of level fields, 
whence the swift fighting machines of an aircraft 
concentration in keeping with the concentration of 
guns and all other material rose to reconnaissance, 
or to lie in wait as a falcon to pounce upon an in- 
vading German plane. Thus the sky was policed 
by flight against prying aerial eyes. If one German 
plane could descend to an altitude of a thousand 
feet, its photographs would reveal the location of a 
hundred batteries to German gunners and show the 
plan of concentration clearly enough to leave no 
doubt of the line of attack; but the anti-aircraft 
guns, plentiful now as other British material, would 
have caught it going, if not coming, provided it 
escaped being jockeyed to death by half a dozen 
British planes with their machine guns rattling. 

To " camouflet " became a new English verb 
British planes tested out a battery's visibility from 
the air. Landscape painters were called in to assist 
in the deceit. One was set to " camouflet " the auto- 
mobile van for the pigeons which, carried in baskets 
on the men's backs in charges, were released as 
another means of sending word of the progress of 
an attack obscured in the shell-smoke. This con- 
scientious artist " camoufleted " the pigeon-van so 
successfully that the pigeons could not find their way 
home. 



56 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

Night was the hour of movement. At night the 
planes, if they went forth, saw only a vague and 
shadowy earth. The sausage balloons, German and 
Allied, those monitors of the sky, a line of opaque, 
weird question marks against the blue, stared across 
at each other out of range of the enemy's guns, 
" spotting " the fall of shells for their own side 
from their suspended basket observation posts from 
early morning until they were drawn in by their 
gasoline engines with the coming of dusk. Clumsy 
and helpless they seemed; but in common with the 
rest of the army they had learned to reach their 
dugouts swiftly at the first sign of shell fire, and 
descended then with a ridiculous alacrity which sug- 
gested the possession of the animal intelligence of 
self-preservation. Occasionally one broke loose and, 
buffeted like an umbrella down the street by the 
wind, started for the Rhine. And the day before 
the great attack the British aviation corps sprang 
a surprise on the German sausages, six of which 
disappeared in balls of flame. 

A one-armed man of middle age from India, who 
offered to do his " bit," refused a post at home in 
keeping with his physical limitations. His eyes were 
all right, he said, when he nominated himself as a 
balloon observer, and he never suffered from sea- 
sickness which sausage balloons most wickedly in- 
duce. Many a man who has ascended in one not 



READY FOR THE BLOW 57 

only could see nothing, but wanted to see nothing, 
and turning spinach lopping over the basket rail 
prayed only that the engine would begin drawing in 
immediately. 

One day the one-armed pilot was up with a " joy- 
rider"; that is, an officer who was not a regular 
aerial observer but was sight-seeing. The balloon 
suddenly broke loose with the wind blowing strong 
toward Berlin, which was a bit awkward, as 
he remarked, considering that he had an inexperi- 
enced passenger. 

"We mustn't let the Boches get us!" he said. 
" Look sharp and do as I say." 

First, he got the joy-rider into the parachute har- 
ness for such emergencies and over the side, then 
himself, both descending safely on the right side of 
the British trenches — which was rather " smart 
work," as the British would say, but all to the taste 
of the one-armed pilot who was looking for ad- 
ventures. I have counted thirty-three British sau- 
sage balloons within my range of vision from a hill. 
The previous year the British had not a baker's 
dozen. 

What is lacking? Have we enough of every- 
thing? These questions were haunting to organ- 
izers in those last days of preparation. 

After dark the scene from a hill, as you rode 
toward the horizon of flashes, was one of incredible 



58 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

grandeur. Behind you, as you looked toward the 
German lines, was the blanket of night pierced and 
slashed by the flashes of gun blasts; overhead the 
bloodcurdling, hoarse sweep of their projectiles; 
and beyond the darkness had been turned into a 
chaotic, uncanny day by the jumping, leaping, 
spreading blaze of explosives which made all 
objects on the landscape stand out in flickering 
silhouette. Spurts of flame from the great shells 
rose out of the bowels of the earth, softening with 
their glow the sharp, concentrated, vicious snaps of 
light from shrapnel. Little flashes played among 
big flashes and flashes laid over flashes shingle 
fashion in a riot of lurid competition, while along 
the line of the German trenches at some places lay 
a haze of shimmering flame from the rapid fire of 
the trench mortars. 

The most resourceful of descriptive writers is 
warranted in saying that the scene was indescribable. 
Correspondents did their best, and after they 
had squeezed the rhetorical sponge of its last drop 
of ink distilled to frenzy of adjectives in inadequate 
effort, they gaspingly laid their copy on the table 
of the censor, who minded not " word pictures " 
which contained no military secrets. 

Vision exalted and numbed by the display, one's 
mind sought the meaning and the purpose of this 
unprecedented bombardment, with its precision of 



READY FOR THE BLOW 59 

the devil's own particular brand of " kultur," which 
was to cut the Germans' barbed wire, smash in 
their trenches, penetrate their dugouts, close up their 
communication trenches, do unto their second line 
the same as to their first line, bury their machine 
guns in debris, crush each rallying strong point in 
that maze of warrens, burst in the roofs of village 
billets over their heads, lay a barrier of death across 
all roads and, in the midst of the process of killing 
and wounding, imprison the men of the front line 
beyond relief by fresh troops and shut them off from 
food and munitions. Theatric, horrible and more 
than that — matter-of-fact, systematic war! There 
was relatively little response from the German bat- 
teries, whose silence had a sinister suggestion. They 
waited on the attack as the target of their revenge 
for the losses which they were suffering. 

By now they knew from the bombardment, if not 
from other sources, that a British attack was com- 
ing at some point of the line. Their flares were 
playing steadily over No Man's Land to reveal any 
movement by the British or the French. From 
their trenches rose signal rockets — the only real fire- 
works, leisurely and innocent, without any sting of 
death in their sparks — which seemed to be saying 
" No movement yet " to commanders who could not 
be reached by any other means through the curtains 
of fire and to artillerists who wanted to turn on 



60 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

their own curtains of lire instantly the charge 
started. Then there were other little flashes and 
darts of light and flame which insisted on adding 
their moiety to the garish whole. And under the 
German trenches at several points were vast charges 
of explosives which had been patiently borne under 
ground through arduously made tunnels. 

So much for the machinery of material. Thus 
far we have mentioned only guns and explosions, 
things built of steel to fire missiles of steel and 
things on wheels, and little about the machine of 
human beings now to come abreast of the tape for 
the charge, the men who had been " blooded," the 
" cannon fodder." Every shell was meant for kill- 
ing men; every German battery and machine gun 
was a monster frothing red at the lips in anticipa- 
tion of slaughter. 

A fury of trench raids broke out from the Somme 
to Ypres further to confuse the enemy as to the 
real front of attack. Men rushed the trenches 
which they were to take and hold later, and by their 
brief visit learned whether or not the barbed wire 
had been properly cut to give the great charge a 
clear pathway and whether or not the German 
trenches were properly mashed. They brought in 
prisoners whose identification and questioning were 
invaluable to the intelligence branch, where the big 
map on the wall was filled in with the location of 



READY FOR THE BLOW 61 

German divisions, thus building up the order of bat- 
tle, so vital to all plans, with its revelation of the 
disposition and strength of the enemy's forces. It 
was known that the Germans were rapidly bringing 
up new batteries north of the Ancre while low 
visibility postponed the day of the attack. 

The men that worked on the new roads keeping 
them in condition for the passage of the heavy 
transport, whether columns of motor trucks, or 
caissons, or the great tractors drawing guns, were 
no less a part of the scheme than the daring 
raiders. Every soldier who was going over the 
parapet in the attack must have his food and drink 
and bombs to throw and cartridges to fire after he 
had reached his objective. 

Most telling of all the innumerably suggestive 
features to me were the streets of empty white tents 
at the casualty clearing stations, and the empty hos- 
pital cars on the railway sidings, and the new en- 
closures for prisoners — for these spoke the human 
note. These told that man was to be the target. 

The staff might plan, gunners might direct their 
fire accurately against unseen targets by the magic 
of their calculations, generals might prepare their 
orders, the intricate web of telephone and telegraph 
wires might hum with directions, but the final test lay 
with him who, rifle and bomb ready in hand, was 
going to cross No Man's Land and take possession 



62 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

of the German trenches. A thousand pictures cloud 
the memory and make a whole intense in one's mind, 
which holds all proudly in admiration of human 
stoicism, discipline and spirit and sadly, too, with a 
conscious awe in the possession as of some treasure 
intrusted to him which he cheapens by his clumsy 
effort at expression. 

Stage by stage the human part had moved for- 
ward. Khaki figures were swarming the village 
streets while the people watched them with a sort of 
worshipful admiration of their stalwart, trained 
bodies and a sympathetic appreciation of what was 
coming. These men with their fair complexion and 
strange tongue were to strike against the Germans. 
Two things the French had learned about the Eng- 
lish : they were generous and they were just, though 
phlegmatic. Now they were to prove that with their 
methodical deliberation they were brave. Some 
would soon die in battle — and for France. 

By day they loitered in the villages waiting on 
the coming of darkness, their training over — nothing 
to do now but wait. If they went forward it was 
by platoons or companies, lest they make a visible 
line on the chalky background of the road to the 
aviator's eye. A battalion drawn up in a field 
around a battalion commander, sitting his horse 
sturdily as he gave them final advice, struck home 
the military affection of loyalty of officer to man and 



READY FOR THE BLOW 63 

man to officer. A soldier parting at a doorway from 
a French girl in whose eyes he had found favor 
during a brief residence in her village struck another 
chord. That elderly woman with her good-by to 
a youth was speaking as she would to her own son 
who was at the front and unconsciously in behalf of 
some English mother. Up near the trenches at dusk, 
in the last billet before the assembly for attack, com- 
pany officers were recalling the essentials of instruc- 
tions to a line standing at ease at one side of the 
street while caissons of shells had the right of way. 

With the coming of night battalions of reserves 
formed and set forth on the march, going toward 
the flashes in the heavens which illumined the men 
in their steady tramp, the warmth of their bodies 
and their breaths pressing close to your car as you 
turned aside to let them pass. " East Surreys," or 
" West Ridings," or " Manchesters " might come 
the answer to inquiries. All had the emblems of 
their units in squares of cloth on their shoulders, and 
on the backs of some of the divisions were bright 
yellow or white patches to distinguish them from 
Germans to the gunners in the shell-smoke. 

Nothing in their action at first glance indicated the 
stress of their thoughts. Officers and men, their 
physical movements set by the mold of discipline, 
were in gesture, in voice, in manner the same as 
when they were on an English road in training. 



64 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

This was a part of the drill, a part of man's mas- 
tery of his emotions. None were under any illusions 
as soldiers of other days had been. Few nursed the 
old idea of being the lucky man who would escape. 
They knew the chances they were taking, the mean- 
ing of frontal attacks and of the murderous and 
wholesale quickness of machine gun methods. 

Will, organized human will, was in their steps 
and shining out of their eyes. It occurred to me that 
they might have escaped this if England had kept 
out of the war at the price of something with which 
Englishmen refused to part. " The day " was com- 
ing, " the day " they had foreseen, " the day " for 
which their people waited. 

When they were closing in with death, the clans 
which make up the British Empire kept faith with 
their character as do all men. These battalions sang 
the songs and whistled the tunes of drill grounds at 
home, though in low notes lest the enemy should 
hear, and lapsed into silence when they drew near 
the front and filed through the communication 
trenches. 

Quiet the English, that great body of the army 
which sees itself as the skirt for the Celtic fringe, 
ploddingly undemonstrative with memories of the 
phlegm of their history holding emotions unex- 
pressed; the Scotch in their kilts, deep-chested, with 
their trunk-like legs and broad hips, braw of face 



READY FOR THE BLOW 6$ 

under their mushroom helmets, seemed like me- 
diaeval men of arms ready in spirit as well as looks 
for fierce hand-to-hand encounters ; the Welsh, more 
emotional than the English, had songs which were 
pleasant to the ear if the words were unrecognizable ; 
and the ruddy-faced Irish, with their soft voices, had 
a beam in their eyes of inward anticipation of the 
sort of thing to come which no Irishman ever meets 
in a hesitating mood. No overseas troops were 
there except the Newfoundland battalion; for only 
sons of the old country were to strike on July ist. 
Returning from a tour at night I had absorbed 
what seemed at one moment the unrealness and at 
another the stern, unyielding reality of the scenes. 
The old French territorial, with wrinkled face and 
an effort at a military mustache, who came out of 
his sentry box at a control post squinting by the light 
of a lantern held close to his nose at the bit of paper 
which gave the bearer freedom of the army and 
nodding with his polite word of concurrence, was a 
type who might have stopped a traveler in Louis 
XIV.'s time. All the farmers sleeping in the villages 
who would be up at dawn at their work, all the people 
in Amiens, knew that the hour was near. The fact 
was in the air no less than in men's minds. Nobody 
mentioned that the greatest struggle of the war was 
about to begin. We all knew that it was in hearts, 
souls, fiber. 



66 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

There were moments when imagination gave to 
that army in its integrity of organization only one 
heart in one body. Again, it was a million hearts 
in a million bodies, deaf except to the voice of com- 
mand. Most amazing was the absence of fuss 
whether with the French or the British. Everybody 
seemed to be doing what he was told to do and to 
know how to do it. With much to be left to im- 
provisation after the attack began, nothing might be 
neglected in the course of preparation. 

In other days where infantry on the march de- 
ployed and brought up suddenly against the enemy 
in open conflict the anticipatory suspense was not 
long and was forgotten in the brief space of con- 
flict. Here this suspense really had been cumulative 
for months. It built itself up, little by little, as the 
material and preparations increased, as the bat- 
talions assembled, until sometimes, despite the roar 
of the artillery, there seemed a great silence while 
you waited for a string, drawn taut, to crack. 

On the night of June 30th, the word was passed 
behind a closed door in the hotel that seven-thirty 
the next morning was the hour and the spectators 
should be called at five — which seemed the final 
word in staff prevision. 



THE BLOW 

Plans at headquarters — A battle by inches — In the observation 
post — The debris of a ruined village — "Softening" by shell 
fire — A slice out of the front — The task of the infantryman — 
The dawn before the attack — Five minutes more— A wave of 
men twenty-five miles long — Mist and shell-smoke — Duty of 
the war-correspondent. 

I was glad to have had glimpses of every aspect of 
the preparation from battalion headquarters in the 
front line trenches to General Headquarters, which 
had now been moved to a smaller town near the 
battlefield where the intelligence branch occupied 
part of a schoolhouse. In place of exercises in geog- 
raphy and lithographs of natural history objects, on 
the schoolroom walls hung charts of the German 
Order of Battle, as built up through many sources of 
information, which the British had to face. There 
was no British Order of Battle in sight. This, as 
the Germans knew it, you might find in a German 
intelligence office ; but the British were not going to 
aid the Germans in ascertaining it by giving it any 
publicity. 

By means of a map spread out on a table an officer 
explained the plan of attack with reference to broad 

67 



68 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

colored lines which denoted the objectives. The 
whole was as explicit as if Bonaparte had said : 

" We shall engage heavily on our left, pound the 
center with our artillery, and flank on our right." 

The higher you go in the command the simpler 
seem the plans which by direct and comprehensive 
strokes conceal the detail which is delegated down 
through the different units. At Gommecourt there 
was a salient, an angle of the German trench line 
into the British which seemed to invite " pinching," 
and this was to be the pivot of the British move- 
ment. The French who were on both sides of the 
Somme were to swing in from their southern flank 
of attack near Soyecourt in the same fashion as the 
British from the northern, thus bringing the deepest 
objective along the river in the direction of Peronne, 
which would fall when eventually the tactical posi- 
tions commanding it were gained. 

Not with the first rush, for the lines of the ob- 
jective were drawn well short of it, but with later 
rushes the British meant to gain the irregular ridge 
formation from Thiepval to Longueval, which 
would start them on the way to the consummation of 
their siege hammering. It was to be a battle by 
inches; the beginning of a long task. German 
morale was still high on the Western front; their 
numbers immense. Morale could be broken, num- 
bers worn down, only by pounding. 



THE BLOW 69 

Granted that the attack of July 1st should suc- 
ceed all along the line, it would gain little ground; 
but it would everywhere break through the first line 
fortifications over a front of more than twenty-five 
miles, the British for about fifteen and the French 
for about ten. The soldierly informant at " Intelli- 
gence " reminded the listener, too, that battalions 
which might be squeezed or might run into unex- 
pected obstacles would suffer fearfully as in all great 
battles and one must be careful not to be over- 
depressed by the accounts of the survivors or over- 
elated by the roseate narratives of battalions which 
had swept all before them with slight loss. 

The day before I saw the map of the whole I had 
seen the map of a part at an Observation Post at 
Auchonvillers. The two were alike in a standard- 
ized system, only one dealt with corps and the other 
with battalions. A trip to Auchonvillers at any time 
during the previous year or up to the end of June, 
19 1 6, had not been fraught with any particular risk. 
It was on the " joy-riders' " route, as they say. 

When I said that the German batteries were 
making relatively little reply to the preliminary 
British bombardment I did not mean to imply that 
they were missing any opportunities. At the dead 
line for automobiles on the road the burst of a 
shrapnel overhead had a suggestiveness that it would 
not have had at other times. Perhaps the Germans 



7 o MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

were about to put a barrage on the road. Perhaps 
they were going to start their guns in earnest. Hap- 
pily, they have always been most considerate where 
I was concerned and they were only throwing in a 
few shells in the course of artillery routine, which 
happened also on our return from the Observa- 
tion Post. But they were steadily attentive with 
" krumps " to a grove where some British howitzers 
sought the screen of summer foliage. If they could 
put any batteries out of action while they waited for 
the attack this was good business, as it meant fewer 
guns at work in support of the British charge. 

An artilleryman, perspiring and mud-spattered 
from shell-bursts, who came across the fields, said: 
" They knocked off the corner of our gun-pit and got 
two men. That's all." His eyes were shining; he 
was in the elation of battle. Casualties were an inci- 
dent in the preoccupation of his work and of the 
thought: " At last we have the shells! At last it is 
our turn ! " 

On our way forward we passed more batteries 
and wisely kept to the open away from them, as they 
are dangerous companions in an artillery duel. 
Then we stepped into the winding communication 
trench with its system of wires fast to the walls, and 
kept on till we passed under a lifted curtain into a 
familiar chamber roofed with heavy cement blocks 
and earth. 



THE BLOW 71 

" Safe from a direct hit by five-point-nines," said 
the observation officer, a regular promoted from the 
ranks who had been " spotting " shells since the war 
began. " A nine-inch would break the blocks, but I 
don't think that it would do us in." 

Even if it did " do us in," why, we were only two 
or three men. All this protection was less perhaps 
to insure safety than to insure security of observa- 
tion for these eyes of the guns. The officer was as 
proud of his O.P. as any battalion commander of 
his trench or a battery commander of his gun- 
position, which is the same kind of human pride that 
a man has in the improvements on his new country 
estate. 

There was a bench to sit on facing the narrow 
observation slit, similar to that of a battleship's 
conning tower, which gave a wide sweep of vision. 
A commonplace enough mise-en-scene on average 
days, now significant because of the stretch of dead 
world of the trench systems and No Man's Land 
which was soon to be seething with the tumult of 
death. 

Directly in front of us was Beaumont-Hamel. Be- 
fore the war it had been like hundreds of other 
villages. Since the war its ruins were like scores of 
others in the front line. Parts of a few walls were 
standing. It was difficult to tell where the debris of 
Beaumont-Hamel began and that of the German 



72 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

trench ended. Dust was mixed with the black bursts 
of smoke rising from the conglomerate mass of 
buildings and streets thrown together by previous 
explosions. The effect suggested the regular spout 
of geysers from a desert rock crushed by charges of 
dynamite. 

Could anybody be alive in Beaumont-Hamel? 
Wasn't this bombardment threshing straw which had 
long since yielded its last kernel of grain? Wasn't 
it merely pounding the graves of a garrison? Other 
villages, equally passive and derelict, were being 
submitted to the same systematic pounding, which 
was like timed hammer-beats. 

" We keep on softening them," said the observer. 

Soldiers have a gift for apt words to describe their 
work, as have all professional experts. Softening! 
It personified the enemy as something hard and 
tough which would grow pulpy under enough well- 
mapped blows striking at every vital part from dug- 
outs to billets. 

All the barbed-wire entanglements in front of the 
first-line trenches appeared to be cut, mangled, 
twisted into balls, beaten back into the earth and 
exhumed again, leaving only a welt of crater-spotted 
ground in front of the chalky contour of the first- 
line trenches which had been mashed and crushed 
out of shape. 

11 Yes, the Boche's first line looks rather messy," 



THE BLOW 73 

said the officer. " We've been giving him an awful 
doing these last few days. Turning our attention 
mostly to the second line, now. That's our lot, 
there," he added, indicating a cluster of bursts over 
a nest of burrows farther up on the hillside. 

" Any attempts to repair their wire at night? " I 
asked. 

" No. They have to do it under our machine 
gun fire. Any Boches who have survived are lying 
doggo." 

How many dugouts were still intact and secure 
refuges for the waiting Germans ? Only trench raids 
could ascertain. As well might the observer with 
his glasses or an aeroplane looking down try to take 
a census of the number of inhabitants of a prairie 
dog village who were all in their holes. 

The officer spread out his map marked " Secret 
and confidential," delimiting the boundaries of a 
narrow sector. He had nothing to do with what 
lay to the right and left — other sectors, other men's 
business — of the area inclosed in the clear, heavy 
lines crosswise of British and German trenches — a 
slice out of the front, as it were. Speaking over 
the telephone to the blind guns, he was interested 
only in the control of gunfire in this sector. The 
charge to him was lines on the map parallel with 
the trenches which would be at given points at given 
moments — lines which he must support when their 



74 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

soldier counterparts were invisible through the 
shell-smoke in the nice calculation of time and range 
which should put the shells into the enemy and never 
into the charging man. 

To infantry commanders with similar maps those 
lines were breathing human lines of men whom they 
had trained, and the gunfire a kind of spray which 
the gunners were to adjust for the protection of the 
battalions when they should cross that dead space. 
Once the British were in the German front trenches, 
details which had been told off for the purpose were 
to take possession of the dugouts and " breach " 
them of prisoners and disarm all other Germans, lest 
they fire into the backs of those who carried the 
charge farther on to the final stage of the objective. 
What awaited them they would know only when they 
climbed over the parapet and became silhouettes of 
vulnerable flesh in the open. Yes, one had the 
system in the large and the small, by the army, the 
corps, the division, the tfcigade, the battalion, and the 
man, the individual infantryman who was to suffer 
that hazard of marching in the open toward the 
trenches which not guns, or motor trucks, or trench- 
mortar shells could take, but only he could take and 
hold. 

The advantage of watching the attack from this 
O.P. in comparison with that of other points was 
mooted; for the spectator had to choose his seat for 



THE BLOW 75 

the panorama. This time we sought a place where 
we hoped to see something of the battle as a whole. 

" C'est arrive! " said the old porter to me at the 
door when I left the hotel before dawn. The great 
day had arrived! 

Amiens was in darkness, with the lightnings of 
the guns which had never ceased their labors through 
the night flashing in the heavens their magnetic 
summons to battle. When a dip into a valley shut 
out their roar a divine hush lay over the world. On 
either side of the main road was the peace of the 
hour before the dawn which would send the peasants 
from their beds to the fields. There were no lights 
yet in the villages. It had not occurred to the inhab- 
itants to try to see the battle. They knew that they 
would be in the way; sentries or gunners would halt 
them. 

The traffic was light and all vehicles, except a 
flying staff officer's car, were going their methodical 
way. Vaguely, as an aviation station was passed, 
planes were visible being pushed out of their sheds; 
the hum of propellers being tried out was faintly 
heard. The birds of battle were testing their wings 
before flight and every one out of the hundreds 
which would take part that day had his task set, no 
less than had a corps, a regiment of artillery, or the 
bombers in a charge. 

" This is the place," was the word to the chauf- 



76 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

feur as we swept up a grade in the misty dark- 
ness. 

Stretched from trunk to trunk of the trees beside 
the road were canvas screens to hide the transport 
from enemy observation. Passing between them had 
the effect of going through the curtains into a par- 
terre box. Light was just breaking and wge were in 
a field of young beets on the crest of a rise, with no 
higher ground beyond us all the way to Thiepval, 
which was in the day's objective, and to Pozieres, 
which was beyond it. Ordinarily, on a clear day we 
should have had from here a view over five or six 
miles of front and through our glasses the action 
should have been visible in detail. 

This morning the sun was not showing his head 
and the early mist lay opaque over all the positions, 
holding in place the mighty volume of smoke from 
bursting shells. As it was not seven o'clock the sun 
might yet realize its duty in July and dissipate this 
shroud, which was so thick that it partially obscured 
the flashes of the guns and the shell-bursts. 

Seven-ten came and seven-twenty and still no more 
light. It was too late now to seek another hill and, 
if we had sought one, we should have had no better 
view. At least, we were seeing as much as the Com- 
mander of the Fourth Army in his dugout near by. 
The artillery fire increased. Every gun was now 
firing, all stretching their powers to the maximum. 



THE BLOW 77 

The mist and smoke over the positions seemed to 
tremble with the blasts. Near-by shells, especially 
German, broke brilliantly against a background so 
thick that it swallowed up the flashes of more distant 
shells in its garishly illumined density. Thousands 
of officers were studying their wrist watches for the 
tick of " zero " as the minute-hands moved on with 
merciless fatalism; and hundreds of thousands of 
men who had come into position overnight were in 
line in the trenches looking to their officers for the 
word. 

Our little group in the beet field was restless and 
silent; or if we spoke it was not of what was oppress- 
ing our minds and stilling our heartbeats. Our 
glasses gave no aid ; they only made the fog thicker. 
Had we been in the first-line British trenches we 
could hardly have seen the men who left them 
through this wall of smoke and mist as they entered 
the German first line and the answering German 
" krumps " would have driven us to the dugouts and 
German curtains of fire held us prisoner. 

One of US' called attention to a lark that had risen 
and was singing with all the power in his little 
throat. Another mentioned a squadron of aero- 
planes against the background of a soft and dome- 
less sky, flying with the precision of wild geese. We 
knew that the German guns were responding now, 
for the, final blasts of British concentration had been 



78 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

a sufficient signal of attack if some British prisoner 
taken in a trench raid had not revealed the hour. 

Seven-twenty-five ! someone said, but not one of us 
needed any reminder. Five minutes more and the 
great experiment would begin. Had Sir Douglas 
Haig made an army equal to the task? What would 
be the answer to skeptics who said that the Lon- 
don cockneys and the Manchester factory hands and 
all the others without military training could not be 
made into a force skilful enough to take those 
trenches? Was the feat of conquering those forti' 
fications within the bounds of human courage, skill 
and resource? 

Not what one saw but what one felt and knew 
counted. A crowd is spellbound in watching a 
steeplejack at work, or an aviator doing a " loop-the- 
loop," or an acrobat swinging from one bar to an- 
other above the sawdust ring, or the " leap of 
death" of the movies; and here we were in the 
presence of a multitude who were running a far 
greater risk in an untried effort, with their inspira- 
tion not a breathless audience but duty. For none 
wanted to die. All were human in this. None had 
any sense of the glorious sport of war, only that 
of grim routine. 

Our group was not particularly religious, but I 
think that we were all uttering a prayer for England 
and France. At seven-thirty something seemed to 



THE BLOW 79 

crack in our brains. There was no visible sign that 
a wave of men twenty-five miles long, reaching from 
Gommecourt to Soyecourt, wherever the trenches 
ran across fields, through villages and along slopes 
to the banks of the Somme and beyond, had left 
their parapets. I knew the men who were going into 
that charge too well to have any apprehension that 
any battalion would falter. The thing was to be 
done and they were to do it. Now they were out 
in No Man's Land; now they were facing the recep- 
tion prepared for them. Thousands might already 
be down. We could discern that the German guns, 
long waiting for their prey, were seeking it in eager 
ferocity as they laid their curtains of fire on the ap- 
pointed places which they had registered. The hell 
of the poets and the priests must have some emotion, 
some temperamental variation. This was sheer 
mechanical hell, its pulse that of the dynamo and 
the engine. 

Seven-forty-five! Helplessly we stared at the 
blanket. If the charge had gone home it was al- 
ready in the German trenches. For all we knew it 
might have been repulsed and its remnants be strug- 
gling' back through the curtains of artillery fire and 
the sweep of machine gun fire. As the sun came out 
without clearing away the mist and shell-smoke over 
the field we had glimpses of some reserves who had 
looked like a yellow patch behind a hill deploying 



80 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

to go forward, suggestive of yellow-backed beetles 
who were the organized servitors of a higher mind 
on some other planet. 

This was all we saw; and to make more of it 
would not be fair to other occasions when views of 
attacks were more intimate. Yet I would not change 
the impression now. It has its place in the spec- 
tator's history of the battle. 



VI 

FIRST RESULTS OF THE SOMME 

At the little schoolhouse — Twenty miles of German fortifications 
taken — Doubtful situation north of Thiepval — Prisoners and 
wounded — Defeat and victory — The topography of Thiepval — 
Sprays of bullets and blasts of artillery fire — "The day" of 
the New Army — The courage of civilized man — Fighting 
with a kind of divine stubbornness — Braver than the " Light 
Brigade " — Died fighting as final proof of the New Army's 
spirit — Crawling back through No Man's Land — Not beaten 
but roughly handled. 

In the room at the head of the narrow stairs in the 
schoolhouse of the quiet headquarters town we 
should have the answer to the question, Has the 
British attack succeeded? which was throbbing in 
our pulsebeats. By the same map on the table in the 
center of the room showing the plan of attack with 
its lines indicating the objectives we should learn 
how many of them had been gained. The officer 
who had outlined the plan of battle with fine candor 
was equally candid about its results, so far as they 
were known. Not only did he avoid mincing 
words, but he avoided wasting them. 

From Thiepval northward the situation was ob- 
scure. The German artillery response had been 
heavy and the action almost completely blanketed 

81 



82 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

from observation. Some detachments must have 
reached their objective, as their signals had been 
seen. From La Boisselle southward the British had 
taken every objective. They were in Mametz and 
Montauban and around Fricourt. For the French 
it had been a clean sweep, without a single repulse. 
Twenty miles of those formidable German fortifica- 
tions were in the possession of the Allies. 

On the ledge of the schoolroom window, with 
the shrill voices of the children at recess playing in 
the yard below rising to my ears, I wrote my dis- 
patch for the press at home, less conscious then than 
now of the wonder of the situation. Downstairs 
the cure of the church next door was standing on 
the steps, an expectant look in his eyes. When I 
told him the news his smile and the flash of his eye, 
which lacked the meekness usually associated with 
the Church, were good to see. 

" And the French? " he asked. 

" All of their objectives! " 

" Ah ! " He drew a deep breath and rubbed his 
hands together softly. " And prisoners? " 

" A great many." 

"Ah! And guns?" 

" Yes." 

Thus he ran up the scale of happiness. I left him 
on the steps of the church with a proud, glad, ab- 
stracted look. 



FIRST RESULTS OF THE SOMME 83 

Beyond the town peaceful fields stretched away to 
the battle area, where figures packed together inside 
the new prisoners' inclosures made a green blot. 
Litters were thick in the streets of the casualty clear- 
ing stations which had been empty yesterday. There 
were no idle ambulances now. They had passengers 
in green as well as in khaki. The first hospital trains 
were pulling out from the rail-head across from a 
clearing station. Thus promptly, as foreseen, the 
processes of battle had worked themselves out. 

From " light " cases and from " bad " cases, from 
officers and men, you had the account of an indi- 
vidual's supreme experience, infinitesimal compared 
to the whole but when taken together making up 
the whole. The wounded in the Thiepval-Gomme- 
court sector spoke of having " crawled " back across 
No Man's Land. South of Thiepval they had 
"walked" back. This, too, told the story of the 
difference between repulse and victory. 

As the fight went for each man in the fray, so the 
battle went to his conception. The spectator going 
here and there could hear accounts at one head- 
quarters of battalions that were beyond the first- 
line trenches and at another of battalions whose 
survivors were back in their own trenches. He 
could hear one wounded man say: " It was too stiff, 
sir. There was no getting through their curtains 
of fire against their machine guns, sir;" and an- 



84 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

other : " We went into their first line without a 
break and right on, gathering in Boches on the 
way." 

Victory is sweet. It writes itself. Perhaps be- 
cause failure is harder to write, though in this case 
it is equally glorious, we shall have this first. To 
make the picture of that day clearer, imagine a 
movement of the whole arm, with the shoulder at 
Gommecourt and the fist swinging in at Montauban, 
crushing its way against those fortifications. It 
broke through for a distance of more than from the 
elbow to the fingers' ends twenty miles southward 
from Thiepval — a name to bear in mind. Men 
crossing the open under protecting waves of shell 
fire had proved that men in dugouts with machine 
guns were not invincible. 

From a certain artillery observation post in a 
tree you had a good view of Thiepval, already a 
blackened spot with the ruins of the chateau showing 
white in its midst and pricked by the toothpick-like 
trunks of trees denuded of their limbs, which were 
to become such a familiar sight on the battlefield. 
It was uphill all the way to Thiepval for the British. 
A river so-called, really a brook, the Ancre, runs at 
the foot of the slope and turns eastward beyond 
Thiepval, where a ridge called Crucifix Ridge north- 
east of the village takes its name from a Christ with 
outstretched arms visible for many miles around. 



FIRST RESULTS OF THE SOMME 85 

Then on past the bend of the Ancre the British and 
the German positions continued to the Gommecourt 
salient. 

Along these five miles the odds of terrain were all 
against the British. The high ground which they 
sought to gain was of supreme tactical value. Na- 
ture was an ally of soldierly industry in constructing 
defenses. The German staff expected the brunt of 
the offensive in this sector and every hour's delay 
in the attack was invaluable for their final prepara- 
tions. Thiepval, Beaumont-Hamel and Gomme- 
court would not be yielded if there were any power 
of men or material at German command to keep 
them. Indeed, the Germans said that Thiepval 
was impregnable. Their boast was good on July 
1st but not in the end, as we shall see, for, before 
the summer was over, Thiepval was to be taken 
with less loss to the British than to the de- 
fenders. 

At Beaumont-Hamel and Thiepval, particularly, 
and in all villages house cellars had been enlarged 
and connected by new galleries, the debris from 
the buildings forming a thicker roof against pene- 
tration by shells. Where there had seemed no life 
in Beaumont-Hamel battalions were snug in their 
refuges as the earth around trembled from the 
explosions. Those shell-threshed parapets of the 
first-line German trenches which appeared to repre- 



86 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

sent complete destruction had not filled in all the 
doorways of dugouts which big shells had failed to 
reach. The cut and twisted fragments of barbed 
wire which were the remains of the maze of entan- 
glements fringing the parapets no longer pro- 
tected them from a charge; but the garrisons de- 
pended upon another kind of defense which sent its 
deadly storms against the advancing infantry. 

The British battalions that went over the parapet 
from Thiepval northward were of the same mettle 
as those that took Montauban and Mametz; their 
training and preparation the same. Where bat- 
talions to the southward swept forward according 
to plan and the guns' pioneering was successful, 
those on this front in many cases started from 
trenches already battered in by German shell fire. 
A few steps across that dead space and officers knew 
that the supporting artillery, working no less thor- 
oughly in its preliminary bombardment here than 
elsewhere, had not the situation in hand. 

All the guns which the Germans had brought up 
during the time that weather delayed the British 
attack added their weight to the artillery concentra- 
tion. Down the valley of the Ancre at its bend they 
had more or less of an enfilade. Machine guns had 
survived in their positions in the debris of the 
trenches or had been mounted overnight and others 
appeared from manholes in front of the trenches. 



FIRST RESULTS OF THE SOMME 87 

Sprays of bullets cut crosswise of the blasts of the 
German curtains of artillery fire. How any men 
could go the breadth of No Man's Land and survive 
would have been called miraculous in other days; 
in these days we know that it was due to the law of 
chance which will wound one man a dozen times 
and never bark the skin of another. 

Any troops might have been warranted in giving 
up the task before they reached the first German 
trench. Veterans could have retired without criti- 
cism. This is the privilege of tried soldiers who 
have won victories and are secured by such an ex- 
pression as, " If the Old Guard saw that it could not 
be done, why, then, it could not." But these were 
New Army men in their first offensive. Their 
victories were yet to be won. This was " the day." 

Each officer and each man had given himself up 
as a hostage to death for his cause, his pride of 
battalion and his manhood when he went over the 
parapet. The business of the officers was to lead 
their men to certain goals; that of the men was to 
go with the officers. All very simple reasoning, this, 
yet hardly reason: the second nature of training 
and spirit. How officers had studied the details of 
their objectives on the map in order to recognize 
them when they were reached! How like drill it 
was the way that those human waves moved for- 
ward! But they were not waves for long in some 



88 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

instances, only survivors still advancing as if they 
were parts of a wave, unseen by their commanders 
in the shell-smoke, buffeted by bursts of high ex- 
plosives, with every man simply keeping on toward 
the goal till he arrived or fell. Foolhardy, you say. 
Perhaps. It is an easy word to utter over a map 
after the event. You would think of finer words if 
you had been at the front. 

Would England have wanted her New Army to 
act otherwise? — the first great army that she had 
put into the field on trial on the continent of Europe 
against an army which had, by virtue of its own 
experience, the right to consider the newcomers as 
amateurs? They became more skilful later; but in 
war all skill is based on such courage as these men 
showed that day. Those who sit in offices in times 
of peace and think otherwise had better be relieved. 
It is the precept that the German Army itself taught 
and practiced at Ypres and Verdun. On July ist a 
question was answered for anyone who had been in 
the Manchurian war. He learned that those bred 
in sight of cathedrals in the civilization of the epic 
poem can surpass without any inspiration of oriental 
fatalism or religious fanaticism the courage of the 
land of Shintoism and Bushido. 

In most places the charge reached the German 
trenches. There, frequently outnumbered by the 
garrison, the men stabbed and bombed, fought to put 



FIRST RESULTS OF THE SOMME 89 

out machine guns that were turned on them and so 
stay the tide coming out of the mouths of dugouts — 
simply fought and kept on fighting with a kind of 
divine stubbornness. 

Tennyson's " Light Brigade " seems bombast and 
gallery play after July 1st. In that case some men 
on horses who had received an order rode out and 
rode back, and verse made ever memorable this wild 
gallop of exhilaration with horses bearing the men. 
The battalions of July 1st went on their own feet 
driven by their own will toward their goals, with- 
out turning back. Surviving officers with objectives 
burned in their brains led the surviving men past the 
first-line trenches if the directions required this. 
" Theirs not to reason why — theirs but to do and die 
— cannon to right of them volleyed and thundered," 
— old-fashioned, smoke-powder cannon firing round 
shot for the Light Brigade; for these later-day 
battalions every kind of modern shell and machine 
guns, showers of death and sheets of death ! 

The goal — the goal ! Ten men out of a hundred 
reached it in a few cases and when they arrived 
they sent up rocket signals to say that they were 
there ! there ! there ! Two or three battalions lit- 
erally disappeared into the blue. I thought that the 
Germans might have taken a considerable number 
of prisoners, but not so. Those isolated lots who 
went on to their objectives regardless of every other 



90 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

thought died fighting, as final proof of the New 
Army's spirit, against the Germans enraged by 
their heavy losses from the preliminary British 
bombardment. 

It was where gaps existed and gallantry went 
blindly forward, unable in the fog of shell-smoke 
to see whether the units on the right or the left were 
up, that these sacrifices of heroism were made; but 
where command was held over the line and the op- 
position was not of a variable kind counsel was taken 
of the impossible and retreat was ordered. That is, 
the units turned back toward their own trenches 
under direction. They had to pass through the same 
curtain of shell fire in returning as in charging, and 
ahead of them through the blasts they drove their 
prisoners. 

" Never mind. It's from your own side ! " said 
one Briton to a German who had been knocked over 
by a German " krump " when he picked himself up; 
and the German answered that this did not make 
him like it any better. 

Scattered with British wounded taking cover in 
new and old shell-craters was No Man's Land as 
the living passed. A Briton and his prisoner would 
take cover together. An explosion and the prisoner 
might be blown to bits, or if the captor were, an- 
other Briton took charge of the prisoner. Per- 
sistently stubborn were the captors in holding on to 



FIRST RESULTS OF THE SOMME 91 

prisoners who were trophies out of that inferno, 
and when a Briton was back in the first-line trench 
with his German his delight was greater in deliver- 
ing his man alive than in his own safety. Out in No 
Man's Land the wounded hugged their shell-craters 
until the fire slackened or night fell, when they 
crawled back. 

Where early in the morning it had appeared as if 
the attack were succeeding reserve battalions were 
sent in to the support of those in front, and as 
unhesitatingly and steadily as at drill they entered 
the blanket of shell-smoke with its vivid flashes and 
hissing of shrapnel bullets and shell-fragments. 
Commanders, I found, stood in awe of the steadfast 
courage of their troops. Whether officers or men, 
those who came out of hell were still true to their 
heritage of English phlegm. 

Covered with chalk dust from crawling, their 
bandages blood-soaked, bespattered with the blood 
of comrades as they lay on litters or hobbled down 
a communication trench, they looked blank when 
they mentioned the scenes that they had witnessed; 
but they gave no impression of despair. It did not 
occur to them that they had been beaten; they had 
been roughly handled in one round of a many-round 
fight. Had a German counter-attack developed they 
would have settled down, rifle in hand, to stall 
through the next round. And that young officer 



92 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

barely twenty, smiling though weak from loss of 
blood from two wounds, refusing assistance as he 
pulled himself along among the " walking wounded," 
showed a bravery in his stoicism equal to any on the 
field when he said, " It did not go well this time," 
in a way that indicated that, of course, it would in 
the end. 

It was over one of those large scale, raised maps 
showing in facsimile all the elevations that a certain 
corps commander told the story of the whole attack 
with a simplicity and frankness which was a victory 
of character even if he had not won a victory in 
battle. He rehearsed the details of preparation, 
which were the same in their elaborate care as 
those of corps which had succeeded; and he did not 
say that luck had been against him — indeed, he 
never once used the word — but merely that the Ger- 
man fortifications had been too strong and the gun- 
fire too heavy. He bore himself in the same manner 
that he would in his house in England; but his eyes 
told of suffering and when he spoke of his men his 
voice quavered. 

Where the young officer had said that it had not 
gone well this time and a private had said, " We 
must try again, sir ! " the general had said that 
repulse was an incident of a prolonged operation in 
the initial stage, which sounded more professional 
but was no more illuminating. All spoke of lessons 



FIRST RESULTS OF THE SOMME 93 

learned for the future. Thus they had stood the 
supreme test which repulse alone can give. 

What could an observer say or do that was not 
banal in the eyes of men who had been through 
such experiences ? Only listen and look on with the 
awe of one who feels that he is in the presence of 
immortal heroism. And an hour's motor ride away 
were troops in the glow of that success which is 
without comparison in its physical elation — the suc- 
cess of arms. 



VII 

OUT OF THE HOPPER OF BATTLE 

An array of movement — Taking -over the captured space — At 
Minden Post, a crossroads of battle — German prisoners — Their 
desire to live — Their variety — The ambulance line — The refuse 
from the hopper of battle — Resting in the battle line — Remi- 
niscences of the fighters — A mighty crater — The dugouts around 
Fricourt — Method of taking a dugout — The litter over the field. 

When I went southward through that world of 
triumph back of Mametz and Montauban I kept 
thinking of a strong man who had broken free of 
his bonds and was taking a deep breath before an- 
other effort. Where from Thiepval to Gomme- 
court the men who had expected to be organizing 
new trenches were back in their old ones and the 
gunners who had hoped to move their guns forward 
were in the same positions and all the plans for sup- 
plying an army in advance were still on paper, to 
the southward anticipation had become realization 
and the system devised to carry on after success was 
being applied. 

A mighty, eager industry pervaded the rear. 
Here, at last, was an army of movement. New 
roads must be made in order that the transport 
could move farther forward; medical corps men 

94 



OUT OF THE HOPPER OF BATTLE 95 

were establishing more advanced clearing stations; 
new ammunition dumps were being located; military 
police were adapting traffic regulations to the new 
situation. Old trenches had been filled up to give 
trucks and guns passageway. In every face was the 
shining desire which overcomes fatigue. An army 
long trench-tied was stretching its limbs as it found 
itself in the open. At corps headquarters lines were 
drawn on the maps of positions gained and beyond 
them the lines of new objectives. 

Could it be possible that our car was running 
along that road back of the first-line trenches where 
it would have been death to show your head two 
days ago ? And could battalions in reserve be lying 
in the open on fields where forty-eight hours previ- 
ously a company would have drawn the fire of half 
a dozen German batteries? Was it dream or reality 
that you were walking about in the first-line German 
trenches? So long had you been used to stationary 
warfare, with your side and the other side always 
in the same places hedged in by walls of shell fire, 
that the transformation seemed as amazing as if 
by some magic overnight lower Broadway with all 
its high buildings had been moved across the North 
River. 

Among certain scenes which memory still holds 
dissociated from others by their outstanding char- 
acterization, that of Minden Post remains vivid as 



96 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

illustrating the crossroads man-traffic of battle. A 
series of big dugouts, of houses and caves with walls 
of sandbags, back of the first British line near 
Carnoy was a focus of communication trenches 
and the magnet to the men hastening from bullet- 
swept, shell-swept spaces to security. The hot 
breath of the firing-line had scorched them and cast 
them out and they came together in congestion at 
this clearing station like a crowd at a gate. Eyes 
were bloodshot and set in deep hollows from fa- 
tigue, those of the British having the gleam of tri- 
umph and those of the Germans a dazed inquiry 
as they awaited directions. 

Only a half-hour before, perhaps, the Germans 
had been fighting with the ferocity of racial hate 
and the method of iron discipline. Now they were 
simply helpless, disheveled human beings, their 
short boots and green uniforms whitened by chalk 
dust. Hunger had weakened the stamina of many 
of them in the days when the preliminary British 
bombardment had shut them off from supplies; but 
none looked as if he were really underfed. I never 
saw a German prisoner who was except for the in- 
tervals when battle kept the food waiting at the rear 
away from his mouth, though some who were under- 
sized and ill-proportioned looked incapable of ab- 
sorbing nutrition. 

In order to make them fight better they had been 



OUT OF THE HOPPER OF BATTLE 97 

told that the British gave no quarter. Out of hell, 
with shells no longer bursting overhead or bullets 
whimpering and hissing past, they were conscious 
only that they were alive, and being alive, though 
they had risked life as if death were an incident, 
now freed of discipline and of the exhilaration of 
battle, their desire to live was very human in the 
way that hands shot up if a sharp word were spoken 
to them by an officer. They were wholly lacking 
in military dignity as they filed by; but it returned 
as by a magic touch when a non-commissioned officer 
was bidden to take charge of a batch and march 
them to an inclosure. Then, in answer to the com- 
mand shoulders squared, heels rapped together, and 
the instinct of long training put a ramrod to their 
backbones which stiffened mere tired human beings 
into soldiers. Distinct gratitude was evident when 
their papers were taken for examination over the 
return of their identification books, which left them 
still docketed and numbered members of " system " 
and not mere lost souls as they would otherwise 
have considered themselves. 

"All kinds of Boches in our exhibit!" said a 
British soldier. 

As there were, in truth: big, hulking, awkward 
fellows, beardless youths, men of forty with stoops 
formed in civil life, professional men with spec- 
tacles fastened to their ears by cords and fat men 



98 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

with the cranial formation and physiognomy in 
keeping with French comic pictures of the " type 
Boche." 

Mixed with the British wounded they came, tall 
and short, thin and portly, the whole a motley pro- 
cession of friend and foe in a strange companionship 
which was singularly without rancor. I saw only 
one incident of any harshness of captor to prisoner. 
A big German ran against the wounded arm of a 
Briton, who winced with pain and turned and gave 
the German a punch in very human fashion with his 
free arm. Another German with his slit trousers' 
leg flapping around a bandage was leaning on the 
arm of a Briton whose other arm was in a sling. 
A giant Prussian bore a spectacled comrade picka- 
back. Germans impressed as litter-bearers brought 
in still forms in khaki. Water and tobacco, these 
are the bounties which no man refuses to another 
at such a time as this. The gurgle of a canteen at 
a parched mouth on that warm July day was the 
first gift to wounded Briton or German and the next 
a cigarette. 

Every returning Briton was wounded, of course, 
but many of the Germans were unwounded. Long 
rows of litters awaited the busy doctors' visit for 
further examination. First dressings put on by the 
man himself or by a comrade in the firing-line were 
removed and fresh dressings substituted. Ambu- 



. OUT OF THE HOPPER OF BATTLE 99 

lance after ambulance ran up, the litters of those 
who were " next " were slipped in behind the green 
curtains, and on soft springs over spinning rubber 
tires the burdens were sped on their way to England. 

Officers were bringing order out of the tide which 
flowed in across the fields and the communication 
trenches as if they were used to such situations, with 
the firing-line only two thousand yards away. The 
seriously wounded were separated from the lightly 
wounded, who must not expect to ride but must go 
farther on foot. The shell-mauled German borne 
pickaback by a comrade found himself in an ambu- 
lance across from a Briton and his bearer was to 
know sleep after a square meal in the prisoners' 
inclosure. 

And all this was the refuse from the hopper of 
battle, which has no service for prisoners unless to 
carry litters and no use at all for wounded; and it 
was only a by-product of the proof of success com- 
pared to a trip over the field itself — a field still 
fresh. 

Artillery caissons and ambulances and signal wire 
carts and other specially favored transport — fa- 
vored by risk of being in range of hundreds of guns 
— now ran along the road in the former No Man's 
Land which for nearly two years had had no life 
except the patrols at night. The bodies of those 
who fell on such nocturnal scouting expeditions 



ioo MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

could not be recovered and their bones lay there in 
the midst of rotting green and khaki in the company 
of the fresh dead of the charge who were yet to be 
buried. 

There was the battalion which took the trenches 
resting yonder on a hillside, while another battalion 
took its place in the firing-line. The men had 
stripped off their coats; they were washing and 
making tea and sprawling in the sunshine, these 
victors, looking across at curtains of fire where the 
battle was raging. Thus reserves might have 
waited at Gettysburg or at Waterloo. 

" They may put some shells into you," I suggested 
to their colonel. 

" Perhaps," he said. The prospect did not seem 
to disturb him or the men. It was a possibility hazy 
to minds which asked only sleep or relaxation after 
two sleepless nights under fire. " The Germans 
haven't any aeroplanes up to enable them to see 
us and no sausage balloons, either. Since our planes 
brought down those six in flames the day before the 
attack the others have been very coy." 

His young officers were all New Army products ; 
he, the commander, being the only regular. There 
were still enough regulars left to provide one for 
each of the New Army battalions, in some cases 
even two. 

" The men were splendid," he said, " just as good 



OUT OF THE HOPPER OF BATTLE 101 

as regulars. They went in without any faltering 
and we had a stiffish bit of trench in front of us, 
you know. It's jolly out here, isn't it? " 

He was tired and perhaps he would be killed 
to-morrow, but nothing could prevent him from 
going some distance to show us the way to the 
trenches that his men had taken. They were heroes 
to him and he was one to them ; and they had won. 
That was the thing, victory, though they regarded it 
as a matter of course, which gave them a glow 
warmer than the sunlight as they lay at ease on the 
grass. They had " been in; " they had seen the day 
for which they had long waited. A quality of mas- 
tery was in their bearing, but their elation was tem- 
pered by the thought of the missing comrades, the 
dead. 

" I wish as long as Bill had to go that he hadn't 
fallen before we got to the trench," said one soldier. 
" He had set his heart on seeing what a Boche dug- 
out was like." 

" George was beside me when a Boche got him 
with a bomb. I did for the Boche with a bayonet," 
said another. 

" When the machine gun began I thought that it 
would get us all, but we had to go on." 

They were matter-of-fact, dwelling on the simple 
essentials. Men had died; men had been wounded; 
men had survived. This was all according to ex- 



102 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

pectation. Mostly, they did not rehearse their ex- 
periences. Their brains had had emotion enough; 
their bodies asked for rest. They lay silently enjoy- 
ing the fact of life and sunlight. Details which were 
lost in the haze of action would develop in the 
memory in later years like the fine points of a 
photographic plate. 

The former German trench on a commanding 
knoll had little resemblance to a trench. Here artil- 
lerists had fulfilled infantry requirements to the let- 
ter. Areas of shell-craters lay on either side of the 
tumbled walls and dugout entrances were nearly all 
closed. The infantry which took the position met 
no fire in front, but had an enfilade at one point 
from a machine gun. Where the dead lay told ex- 
actly the breadth of its sweep through which the 
charge had unfalteringly passed; and this was only 
a first objective. As you could see, the charge had 
gone on to its second with slight loss. A young 
officer after being wounded had crawled into a shell- 
crater, drawn his rubber sheet over him and so had 
died peacefully, the clot of his life's blood on the 
earth beside him. 

In the field of ruins around Fricourt a mighty 
crater of one of the mines exploded on July ist at 
the hour of attack was large enough to hold a bat- 
talion. Germans had gone aloft in a spatter with 
its vast plume of smoke and dust scooped from the 



OUT OF THE HOPPER OF BATTLE 103 

bowels of the earth. Famous since to sightseers of 
war were the dugouts around Fricourt which were 
the last word in German provision against attack. 
The making of dugouts is standardized like every- 
thing else in this war. There is the same angle of 
entrance, the same flight of steps to that underground 
refuge, in keeping with the established pattern. 
Depth, capacity and comfort are the result of local 
initiative and industry. There may be beds and 
tables and tiers of bunks. Many such chambers 
were as undisturbed as if never a shell had burst in 
the neighborhood. The Germans in occupation had 
been told to hold on ; a counter-attack would relieve 
them. The faith of some of them endured so well 
that they had to be blasted out by explosives before 
they would surrender. 

There was reassurance in the proximity of such 
good dugouts when habitable to a correspondent if 
shells began to fall, as well as protection for the 
British in reserve. Some whence came foul odors 
were closed by the British as the simplest form of 
burial for the dead within who had waited for bombs 
to be thrown before surrendering. For the method 
of taking a dugout had long since become as 
standardized as its construction. The men inside 
could have their choice from the Briton at the en- 
trance. 

" Either file out or take what we send," as a 



io 4 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

soldier put it. " We can't leave you there to come 
out and fire into our backs, as the Kaiser told you 
to do, when we've started on ahead." 

You could follow for miles the ruins of the first 
line, picking your way among German dead in all 
attitudes, while a hand or a head or a foot stuck 
out of the shell-hammered chalk mixed with flesh 
and fragments of clothing, the thing growing nau- 
seatingly horrible and your wonder increasing as 
to how gunfire had accomplished the destruction and 
how men had been able to conquer the remains that 
the shells had left. It was a prodigious feat, em- 
phasizing again the importance of the months of 
preparation. 

And the litter over the whole field ! This, in turn, 
expressed how varied and immense is the material 
required for such operations. One had in mind the 
cleaning up after some ghastly debauch. Shell- 
fragments were mixed with the earth; piles of 
cartridge cases lay beside pools of blood. Trench 
mortars poked their half-filled muzzles out of the 
toppled trench walls. Bundles of rocket flares, 
empty ammunition boxes, steel helmets crushed in 
by shell-fragments, gasbags, eye-protectors against 
lachrymatory shells, spades, water bottles, unused 
rifle grenades, egg bombs, long stick-handled Ger- 
man bombs, map cases, bits of German " K.K." 
bread, rifles, the steel jackets of shells and unex- 



OUT OF THE HOPPER OF BATTLE 105 

ploded shells of all calibers were scattered about 
the field between the irregular welts of chalky soil 
where shell fire had threshed them to bits. 

The rifles and accoutrements of the fallen were 
being gathered in piles, this being, too, a part 
of a prearranged system, as was the gathering of 
the wounded and later of the dead who had worn 
them. Big, barelegged forms of the sturdy High- 
land regiment which would not halt for a machine 
gun were being brought in and laid in a German 
communication trench which had only to be closed 
to make a common grave, each identification disk 
being kept as a record of where the body lay. An- 
other communication trench near by was reserved 
for German dead who were being gathered at 
the same time as the British. In life the foes had 
faced each other across No Man's Land. In death 
they were also separated. 

Up to the first-line German trenches, of course, 
there were only British dead, those who had fallen 
in the charge. It was this that made it seem as if 
the losses had been all on one side. In the German 
trenches the entries on the other side of the ledger 
appeared; and on the fields and in the communica- 
tion trenches lay green figures. Over that open 
space they were scattered green dots; again, where 
they had run for cover to a wood's edge, they lay 
thick as they had dropped under the fire of a 



106 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

machine gun which the British had brought into 
action. A fierce game of hare and hounds had been 
played. Both German and British dead lay facing 
in the same direction when they were in the open, 
the Germans in retreat, the British in pursuit. An 
officer called attention to this grim proof that the 
initiative was with the British. 

By the number of British dead lying in No Man's 
Land or by the blood clots when the bodies had been 
removed, it was possible to tell what price battalions 
had paid for success. Nothing could bring back the 
lives of comrades who had fallen in front of 
Thiepval to the survivors of that action; but could 
they have seen the broad belts of No Man's Land 
with only an occasional prostrate figure it would 
have had the reassurance that another time they 
might have easier going. Wherever the Germans 
had brought a machine gun into action the results 
of its work lay a stark warning of the necessity of 
silencing these automatic killers before a charge. 
Yet from Mametz to Montauban the losses had 
been light, leaving no doubt that the Germans, con- 
vinced that the weight of the attack would be to the 
north, had been caught napping. 

The Allies could not conceal the fact and general 
location of their offensive, but they did conceal its 
plan as a whole. The small number of shell-craters 
attested that no such artillery curtains of fire had 



OUT OF THE HOPPER OF BATTLE 107 

been concentrated here as from Thiepval to Gorame- 
court. Probably the Germans had not the artillery 
to spare or had drawn it off to the north. 

All branches of the winning army making them- 
selves at home in the conquered area among the 
dead and the litter behind the old German first line 
— this was the fringe of the action. Beyond was the 
battle itself, with the firing-line still advancing under 
curtains of shell-bursts. 



VIII 

FORWARD THE GUNS ! 

An audacious battery — " An unusual occasion " — Guns to the front 
at night — Close to the firing-line — Not so dangerous for ob- 
servers — The German lines near by — Advantages of even a 
gentle slope — Skilfully chosen German positions — A game of 
hide and seek with death — Business-like progress — Haze, shell- 
smoke and moving figures — Each figure part of the " system." 

Hadn't that battery commander mistaken his direc- 
tions when he emplaced his howitzers behind a bluff 
in the old No Man's Land? Didn't he know that 
the German infantry was only the other side of the 
knoll and that two or three score German bat- 
teries were in range? I looked for a tornado to 
descend forthwith upon the gunners' heads. I liked 
their audacity, but did not court their company 
when I could not break a habit of mind bred in the 
rules of trench-tied warfare where the other fellow 
was on the lookout for just such fair targets as they. 
For the moment these " hows " were not firing 
and the gunners were in a little circumscribed world 
of their own, dissociated from the movement around 
them as they busily dug pits for their ammunition. 
In due course someone might tell them to begin 
registering on a certain point or to turn loose on one 

108 



FORWARD THE GUNS! 109 

which they had already registered. Meanwhile, 
very workmanlike in their shirt-sleeves, they had no 
concern with the traffic in the rear, except as it re- 
lated to their own supply of shells, or with the litter 
of the field, or the dead, or the burial parties and 
the scattered wounded passing back from the firing- 
line. Their business relations were exclusively with 
the battle area hidden by the bluff. I thought that 
they were " rather fond of themselves " (as the 
British say) that morning, though not so much so, 
perhaps, as the crew of the eighteen pounders 
still farther forward within about a thousand yards 
of the Germans whom they were pelting with 
shrapnel. 

Ordinarily, the eighteen pounders were expected 
to keep a distance of four or five thousand yards; 
but this was " rather an unusual occasion " as an 
officer explained. It would never do for the eighteen 
pounders to be wall-flowers; they must be on the 
ballroom floor. Had these men who were mechan- 
ically slipping shells into the gun-breeches slept last 
night or the previous night? Oh, yes, for two or 
three hours when they were not firing. 

What did fatigue matter to an eighteen-pounder 
spirit released from the eternal grind of trench war- 
fare and pushing across the open in the way that 
eighteen pounders were meant to do ? Weren't they 
horse artillery? What use had they had for their 



i io MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

horses in the immovable Ypres salient except when 
they drew back their guns to the billets after their 
tour of duty? — they who had drilled and drilled in 
evolutions in England under the impression that 
field guns were a mobile arm ! 

When orders came on the afternoon of July ist 
to go ahead " right into it " it was like a summons 
to a holiday for a desk-ridden man brought up in 
the Rockies. Out into the night with creaking 
wheels and caissons following with sharp words of 
urging from the sergeant, " Now, wheelers, as I 
taught you at Aldershot," as they went across old 
trenches or up a stiff slope and into the darkness, with 
transport giving them the right of way, and on to 
a front that was in motion, with officers studying 
their maps and directions by the pocket flashlight — 
this was something like. And a young lieutenant 
hurried forward to where the rifles were talking to 
signal back the results of the guns firing from the 
midst of the battle. Something like, indeed 1 The 
fellows training their pieces in keeping with his in- 
structions might be in for a sudden concentration of 
blasts from the enemy, of course. Wasn't that part 
of the experience? Wasn't it their place to take 
their share of the pounding, and didn't they belong 
to the guns? 

These were examples close at hand, but sprinkled 
about the well-won area I saw the puffs from other 



FORWARD THE GUNS! in 

British batteries which, after a nocturnal journey, 
morning found close to the firing-line. While I was 
moving about in the neighborhood I cast glances in 
the direction of that particular battery of eighteen 
pounders which was still serenely firing without 
being disturbed by the German guns. There was 
something unreal about it after nearly two years of 
the Ypres salient. 

But the worst shock to a trench-tied habit of mind 
was when I stood upon the parapet of a German 
trench and saw ahead the British firing-line and the 
German, too. I ducked as instinctively, according 
to past training, as if I had seen a large, black, mur- 
derous thing coming straight for my head. In the 
stalemate days a dozen sharpshooters waiting for 
such opportunities would have had a try at you; a 
machine gun might have loosened up, and even bat- 
teries of artillery in their search for game to show 
itself from cover did not hesitate to snipe with 
shells at an individual. 

I must be dead; at least, I ought to be according 
to previous formulae; but realizing that I was still 
alive and that nothing had cracked or whistled over- 
head, I took another look and then remained stand- 
ing. I had been considering myself altogether too 
important a mortal. German guns and snipers were 
not going to waste ammunition on a non-combatant 
on the skyline when they had an overwhelming 



ii2 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

number of belligerent targets. A few shrapnel 
breaking remotely were all that we had to bother us, 
and these were sparingly sent with the palpable 
message, " We'll let you fellows in the rear know 
what we would do to you if we were not so pre- 
occupied with other business." 

I was near enough to see the operations; to have 
gone nearer would have been to face in the open the 
sweep of bullets over the heads of the British front 
line hugging the earth, which is not wise in these 
days of the machine gun. A correspondent likes to 
see without being shot at and his lot is sometimes 
to be shot at without being able to see anything 
except the entrance of a dugout, which on some oc- 
casions is more inviting than the portals of a palace. 

In the distance was the main German second 
trench line on the crest of Longueval and High 
Wood Ridge, which the British were later to win 
after a struggle which left nothing of woods or vil- 
lages or ridges except shell-craters. Naturally, the 
Germans had not restricted their original defenses 
to the ridge itself, any more than the French had 
theirs to the hills immediately in front of Verdun. 
They had placed their original first-line trenches 
along the series of advantageous positions on the 
slope and turned every bit of woods and every emi- 
nence into a strong point on the way back to the 
second line, whose barbed-wire entanglements rusted 



FORWARD THE GUNS! 113 

by long exposure were distinct under the glasses. A 
German officer stood on the parapet looking out in 
our direction, probably trying to locate the British 
infantry advance which was hugging a fold in the 
ground and resting there for the time being. I 
imagined how beaver-like were the Germans in the 
second line strengthening their defenses. I scanned 
all the slopes facing us in the hope of seeing a Ger- 
man battery. There must be one under those balls 
of black smoke from high explosives from British 
guns and another a half mile away under the same 
kind of shower. 

" They withdrew most of their guns behind the 
ridge overnight," said an officer, " in order to avoid 
capture in case we made another rush." 

On the other side of this natural wall they would 
be safe from any except aerial observation, and the 
advanced British batteries, though all in the open, 
were in folds in the ground, or behind bluffs, or 
just below the skyline of a rise where they had 
found their assigned position by the map. How 
much a few feet of depression in a field, a slightly 
sunken road, the grade of a gentle slope, which hid 
man or gun from view counted for I did not realize 
that day as I was to realize in the fierce fight for 
position which was to come in succeeding weeks. 

It was easy to understand why the Germans had 
made a strong point in the first line where I was 



1 14 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

standing, for it was a position which, in relation to 
both the British and the German trenches, would in- 
stantly appeal to the tactical eye. Here they had 
emplaced machine guns manned by chosen desperate 
men which had given the British charge its worst 
experience over a mile front. I could see all the 
movement over a broad area to the rear which, how- 
ever, the rise under my feet hid from the ridge where 
the German officer stood. The advantage which 
the Germans had after their retreat from the Marne 
was brought home afresh once you were on con- 
quered ground. A mile more or less of depth had 
no sentimental interest to them, for they were on 
foreign soil. They had chosen their positions by 
armies, by corps, by battalions, by hundreds of 
miles and tens of miles and tens of yards with the 
view to a command of observation and ground. 
This was a simple application of the formula as old 
as man; but it was their numbers and preparedness 
that permitted its application and wherever the Al- 
lies were to undertake the offensive they must face 
this military fact, which made the test of their skill 
against frontal positions all the stiffer and added 
tribute to success. 

The scene in front reminded one of a great carpet 
which did not lie flat on the floor but was in un- 
dulations, with the whole on an incline toward 
Longueval and High Wood Ridge. The Ridge I 



FORWARD THE GUNS! 115 

shall call it after this, for so it was in capital letters 
to millions of French, British and German soldiers 
in the summer of 19 16. And this carpet was peopled 
with men in a game of hide and seek with death 
among its folds. 

No vehicle, no horse was anywhere visible. Yet 
it was a poignantly live world where the old trench 
lines had been a dead world — a world alive in the 
dots of men strung along the crest, in others digging 
new trenches, in messengers and officers on the 
move, in clumps of reserves behind a hillock or in 
a valley. Though bursting shrapnel jackets whipped 
out the same kind of puffs as always from a flashing 
center which spread into nimbus radiant in the sun- 
light and the high explosives sent up the same spouts 
of black smoke as if a stick of dynamite had burst 
in a coal box, the shell fire seemed different; it had 
a quality of action and adventure in comparison with 
the monotonous exhibition which we had watched in 
stalemate warfare. Death now had some element 
of glory and sport. It was less like set fate in a 
stationary shambles. 

Directly ahead was a bare sweep of field of waste 
wild grass between the German communication 
trenches where wheat had grown before the war, 
and the British firing-line seemed like heads fas- 
tened to a greenish blanket. Holding the ground 
that they had gained, they were waiting on some- 



n6 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

thing to happen elsewhere. Others must advance 
before they could go farther. 

The battle was not general; it raged at certain 
points where the Germans had anchored themselves 
after some recovery from the staggering blow of the 
first day. Beyond Fricourt the British artillery was 
making a crushing concentration on a clump of 
woods. This seemed to be the hottest place of all. 
I would watch it. Nothing except the blanket of 
shell-smoke hanging over the trees was visible for 
a time, unless you counted figures some distance 
away moving about in a sort of detached pantomime. 

Then a line of British infantry seemed to rise out 
of the pile of the carpet and I could see them mov- 
ing with a drill-ground steadiness toward the edge 
of the woods, only to be lost to the eye in a fold of 
the carpet or in a changed background. There had 
been something workmanlike and bold about their 
rigid, matter-of-fact progress, reflective of man- 
power in battle as seen very distinctly for a space in 
that field of baffling and shimmering haze. I thought 
that I had glimpses of some of them just before 
they entered the woods and that they were mixing 
with figures coming out of the woods. At any rate, 
what was undoubtedly a half company of German 
prisoners were soon coming down the slope in a 
body, only to disappear as if they, too, were playing 
their part in the hide and seek of that irregular 



FORWARD THE GUNS! 117 

landscape with its variation from white chalk to 
dark green foliage. 

Khaki figures stood out against the chalk and 
melted into the fields or the undergrowth, or came 
up to the skyline only to be swallowed into the earth 
probably by the German trench which they were 
entering. I wondered if one group had been killed, 
or knocked over, or had merely taken cover in a 
shell-crater when a German " krump " seemed to 
burst right among them, though at a distance of 
even a few hundred yards nothing is so deceiving 
as the location of a shell-burst in relation to objects 
in line with it. The black cloud drew a curtain over 
them. When it lifted they were not on the stage. 
This was all that one could tell. 

What seemed only a platoon became a company 
for an instant under favorable light refraction. 
The object of British khaki, French blue and Ger- 
man green is invisibility, but nothing can be designed 
that will not be visible under certain conditions. A 
motley such as the " tanks " were painted would be 
best, but the most utilitarian of generals has not yet 
dared to suggest motley as a uniform for an army. 
It occurred to me how distinct the action would have 
been if the participants had worn the blue coats and 
red trousers in which the French fought their early 
battles of the war. 

All was confused in that mixture of haze and 



1 1 8 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

shell-smoke and maze of trenches, with the appear- 
ing and disappearing soldiers living patterns of the 
carpet which at times itself seemed to move to one's 
tiring, intensified gaze. Each one was working out 
his part of a plan; each was a responsive unit of the 
system of training for such affairs. 

The whole would have seemed fantastic if it had 
not been for the sound of the machine guns and the 
rifles and the deeper-throated chorus of the heavy 
guns, which proved that this was no mesmeric, fan- 
tastic spectacle but a game with death, precise and 
ordered, with nothing that could be rehearsed left 
to chance any more than there was in the regulation 
of the traffic which was pressing forward, column 
after column, to supply the food which fed the 
artillery-power and man-power that should crush 
through frontal positions. 



IX 

WHEN THE FRENCH WON 

A big man's small quarters — General Foch — French capacity for 
enjoying a victory — Winning quality of French as victors — 
When the heart of France stood still — The bravery of the 
race — Germany's mistaken estimate of France— Why the French 
will fight this war to a finish — French and Germans as dif- 
ferent breeds as ever lived neighbor — The democracy of the 
French — Elan — " War of movement." 

The farther south the better the news. There was 
another world of victory on the other side of a 
certain dividing road where French and British 
transport mingled. That world I was to see next on 
a day of days — a holiday of elation. 

A brief note, with its permission to " circulate 
within the lines," written in a bold hand in the 
chateau where General Foch directed the Northern 
Group of French Armies, placed no limitation on 
freedom of movement for my French friend and 
myself. 

Of course, General Foch's chateau was small. 
All chateaux occupied by big commanders are small, 
and as a matter of method I am inclined to think. 
If they have limited quarters there is no room 
for the intrusion of anyone except their personal 

«9 



120 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

staff and they can live with the simplicity which is 
a soldier's barrack training. 

Joffre, Castelnau and Foch were the three great 
names in the French Army which the public knew 
after the Marne, and of the three Foch has, per- 
haps, more of the dash which the world associates 
with the French military type. He simplified vic- 
tory, which was the result of the same arduous 
preparation as on the British side, with a single 
gesture as he swept his pencil across the map from 
Dompierre to Flaucourt. Thus his army had gone 
forward and that was all there was to it, which was 
enough for the French and also for the Germans 
on this particular front. 

"It went well I It goes well!" he said, with 
dramatic brevity. He had made the plans which 
were so definite in the bold outline to which he held 
all subordinates in a coordinated execution; and I 
should meet the men who had carried out his plans, 
from artillerists who had blazed the way to infantry 
who had stormed the enemy trenches. There was 
no mistaking his happiness. It was not that of a 
general, but the common happiness of all France. 

Victory in France for France could never mean 
to an Englishman what it meant to a Frenchman. 
The Englishman would have to be on his own soil 
before he could understand what was in the heart 
of the French after their drive on the Somme. I 



WHEN THE FRENCH WON 121 

imagined that day that I was a Frenchman. By 
proxy I shared their joy of winning, which in a way 
seemed to be taking an unfair advantage of my posi- 
tion, considering that I had not been fighting. 

There is no race, it seems to me, who know quite 
so well how to enjoy victory as the French. They 
make it glow with a rare quality which absorbs you 
into their own exhilaration. I had the feeling that 
the pulse of every citizen in France had quickened 
a few beats. All the peasant women as they walked 
along the road stood a little straighter and the old 
men and old women were renewing their youth in 
quiet triumph; for now they had learned the first 
result of the offensive and might permit themselves 
to exult. 

Once before in this war at the Marne I had 
followed the French legions in an advance. Then 
victory meant that France was safe. The people 
had found salvation through their sacrifice, and their 
relief was so profound that to the outsider they 
seemed hardly like the French in their stoic grati- 
tude. This time they were articulate, more like 
the French of our conception. They could fondle 
victory and take it apart and play with it and make 
the most of it. 

If I had no more interest in the success of one 
European people than another, then as a spectator 
I should choose that it should be to the French, 



122 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

provided that I was permitted to be present. They 
make victory no raucous-voiced, fleshy woman, 
shrilly gloating, no superwoman, cold and efficient, 
who considers it her right as a superior being, 
but a gracious person, smiling, laughing, singing in 
a human fashion, whether she is greeting winning 
generals or privates or is looking in at the door of 
a chateau or a peasant's cottage. 

An old race, the French, tried out through many 
victories and defeats until a vital, indescribable 
quality which may be called the art of living gov- 
erns all emotions. Victory to the Germans could 
not mean half what it would to the French. The 
Germans had expected victory and had organized 
for it for years as a definite goal in their ambitions. 
To the French it was a visitation, a reward of cour- 
age and kindly fortune and the right to be the 
French in their own world and in their own way, 
which to man or to State is the most justifiable of all 
rights. 

Twice the heart of France had stood still in sus- 
pense, first on the Marne and then at the opening 
onslaught on Verdun; and between the Marne and 
Verdun had been sixteen months when, on the soil 
of their France and looking out on the ruins of their 
villages, they had striven to hold what remained to 
them. They had been the great martial people of 
Europe and because Napoleon III. tripped them 



WHEN THE FRENCH WON 123 

by the fetish of the Bonaparte name in '70, people 
thought that they were no longer martial. This 
puts the world in the wrong, as it implies that suc- 
cess in war is the test of greatness. When the 
world expressed its surprise and admiration at 
French courage France smiled politely, which is the 
way of France, and in the midst of the shambles, as 
she strained every nerve, was a little amused, not to 
say irritated, to think that Frenchmen had to prove 
again to the world that they were brave. 

Whether the son came from the little shops of 
Paris, from stubborn Brittany, the valley of the 
Meuse, or the vineyards, war made him the same 
kind of Frenchman that he was in the time of Louis 
XIV. and Napoleon, fighting now for France rather 
than for glory as he did in Napoleon's time ; a man 
cured of the idea of conquest, advanced a step far- 
ther than the stage of the conqueror, and his courage, 
though slower to respond to wrath, the finer. He 
had proven that the more highly civilized a people, 
the more content and the more they had to lose by 
war, the less likely they were to be drawn into war, 
the more resourceful and the more stubborn in de- 
fense they might become — especially that younger 
generation of Frenchmen with their exemplary habits 
and their fondness for the open air. 

If France had been beaten at the Marne, notice 
would have been served on humanity that thrift and 



i2 4 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

refinement mean enervation. We should have be- 
lieved in the alarmists who talk of oriental hordes 
and of the vigor of primitive manhood overcoming 
art and education. 

The Germans could not give up their idea that 
both the French and the English must be dying 
races. The German staff had been well enough 
informed to realize that they must first destroy the 
French Army as the continental army most worthy 
of their steel and, at the same time, they could not 
convince themselves that France was other than 
weak. She loved her flesh-pots too well; her fami- 
lies would yield and pay rather than sacrifice only 
sons. 

At any time since October, 19 14, the French could 
have had a separate peace; but the answer of the 
Frenchman, aside from his bounden faith to the 
other Allies, was that he would have no peace that 
was given — only a peace that was yielded. France 
would win by the strength of her manhood or she 
would die. When the war was over a Frenchman 
could look a German in the face and say, " I have 
won this peace by the force of my blows; " or else 
the war would go on to extermination. 

At intervals in the long, long months of sacri- 
fice France was very depressed; for the French are 
more inclined than the English to be up and down 
in their emotions. They have their bad and their 



WHEN THE FRENCH WON 125 

good days. Yet, when they were bluest over re- 
ports of the retreat from the Marne or losses at 
Verdun they had no thought of making terms. De- 
pression merely meant that they would all have to 
succumb without winning. Thus, after the weary 
stalling and resistance of the blows at Verdun, 
never making any real progress in driving the enemy 
out of France, ever dreaming of the day when they 
should see the Germans' backs, France had waited 
for the movement that came on the Somme. , 

The people were always talking of this offensive. 
They had heard that it was under way. Yet, how 
were they to know the truth? The newspapers gave 
vague hints; gossip carried others, more concrete, 
sometimes correct but usually incorrect; and all that 
the women and the old men and the children at home 
could do was to keep on with the work. And this 
they did; it is instinct. Then one morning news 
was flashed over France that the British and the 
French had taken over twenty thousand prisoners. 
The tables were turned at last ! France was on the 
march ! 

"Do you see why we love France?" said my 

friend T , who was with me that day, as with a 

turn of the road we had a glimpse of the valley of 
the Somme. He swung his hand toward the waving 
fields of grain, the villages and plots of woods, as 
the train flew along the metals between rows of 



126 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

stately shade trees. " It is France. It is bred in 
our bones. We are fighting for that — just what you 
see!" 

" But wouldn't you take some of Germany if you 
could? " I asked. 

" No. We want none of Germany and we want 
no Germans. Let them do as they please with what 
is their own. They are brave; they fight well; but 
we will not let them stay in France." 

Look into the faces of the French soldiers and 
look into the faces of Germans and you have two 
breeds as different as ever lived neighbor in the 
world. It would seem impossible that there could 
be anything but a truce between them and either 
preserve its own characteristics of civilization. The 
privilege of each to survive through all the cen- 
turies has been by force of arms and, after the 
Marne and Verdun, the Somme put the seal on 
the French privilege to survive. If there be any 
hope of true internationalism among the continental 
peoples I think that it can rely on the Frenchman, 
who only wants to make the most of his own without 
encroaching on anybody's else property and is dis- 
interested in human incubation for the purpose of 
overwhelming his neighbors. True internationalism 
will spring from the provincialism that holds fast 
to its own home and does not interfere with the 
worship by other countries of their gods. 



WHEN THE FRENCH WON 127 

All this may seem rambling, but to a spec- 
tator of war indulging in a little philosophy it 
goes to the kernel of the meaning of victory to 
the French and to my own happiness in seeing the 
French win. Sometimes the Frenchman seems the 
most soldierly of men; again, a superficial observer 
might wonder if the French Army had any real dis- 
cipline. And there, again, you have French tem- 
perament; the old civilization that has defined itself 
in democracy. For the French are the most demo- 
cratic of all peoples, not excluding ourselves. That 
is not saying that they are the freest of all peoples, 
because no people on earth are freer than the Eng- 
lish or the American. 

An Englishman is always on the lookout lest some- 
one should interfere with his individual rights as he 
conceives them. He is the least gregarious of all 
Europeans in one sense and the French the most 
gregarious, which is a factor contributing to French 
democracy. It is his gregariousness that makes the 
Frenchman polite and his politeness which permits 
of democracy. An officer may talk with a private 
soldier and the private may talk back because of 
French politeness and equality, which yield fellow- 
ship at one moment and the next slip back into the 
bonds of discipline which, by consent of public 
opinion, have tightened until they are as strict as 
in Napoleon's day. Gregariousness was supreme on 



128 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

this day of victory; democracy triumphant. Democ- 
racy had proved itself again as had English freedom 
against Prussian system. Vitality is another French 
possession and this means industry. The German 
also is industrious, but more from discipline and 
training than from a philosophy of life. French 
vitality is inborn, electrically installed by the sun- 
shine of France. 

When a battery of French artillery moves along 
the road it is democratic, but when it swings its guns 
into action it is military. Then its vitality is some- 
thing that is not the product of training, something 
that training cannot produce. A French battalion 
moving up to the trenches seems not to have any 
particular order, but when it goes over the parapet 
in an attack it has the essence of military spirit 
which is coordination of action. No two French 
soldiers seem quite alike on the march or when mov- 
ing about a village on leave. Each seems three 
beings : one a Frenchman, one a soldier, a third him- 
self. German psychology left out the result of the 
combination, just as it never considered that the 
British could in two years submerge their individual- 
ism sufficiently to become a military nation. 

There is a French word, elan, which has been 
much overworked in describing French character. 
Other nations have no equivalent word; other races 
lack the quality which it expresses, a quality which 



WHEN THE FRENCH WON 129 

you get in the wave of a hand from a peasant girl 
to a passing car, in the woman who keeps a shop, 
in French art, habits, literature. To-day old Mon- 
sieur Elan was director-general of the pageant. 

This people of apt phrases have one for the 
operations before the trench system was established; 
it is the " war of movement." That was the word, 
movement, for the blue river of men and transport 
along the roads to the front. We were back to the 
" war of movement " for the time being, at any 
rate; for the French had broken through the Ger- 
man fortifications for a depth of four to five miles 
in a single day. 



X 

ALONG THE ROAD TO VICTORY 

A thrifty victory — Seventeen-inch guns asleep — A procession of 
guns that gorged the roads — French rules of the road — 
Absence of system conceals an excellent system — Spoils of 
war — The Colonial Corps — The " chocolates " — " Boches "■ — 
Dramatic victors — The German line in front of the French 
attack — Galloping soixante-quinzes. 

Anyone with experience of armies cannot be de- 
ceived about losses when he is close to the front. 
Even if he does not go over the field while the dead 
of both sides are still lying there, infallible signs 
without a word being spoken reflect the truth. 
It was shining in panoplies of smiles with the 
French after the attack of July ist. Victory was 
sweet because it came at slight cost. Staff officers 
could congratulate themselves on having driven a 
thrifty bargain. Casualty clearing stations were 
doing a small business; prisoners' inclosures a driv- 
ing one. 

" We've nothing to fire at," said an officer of 
heavy artillery. " Our targets are out of reach. 
The Germans went too fast for us; they left us 
without occupation." 

Where with the British I had watched the prep- 
130 



ALONG THE ROAD TO VICTORY 131 

arations for the offensive develop, the curtain was 
now raised on the French preparations, which were 
equally elaborate, after the offensive had gone home. 
General Joffre had spared more guns from Verdun 
for the Somme than optimism had supposed possible. 
Those immense fellows of caliber from twelve to 
seventeen-inch, mounted on railway trucks, were 
lions asleep under their covers on the sidings which 
had been built for them. Their tracks would have 
to be carried farther forward before they roared at 
the Germans again. 

Five miles are not far for a battalion to march, 
though an immense distance to a modern army with 
its extensive and complicated plant. Even the avi- 
ators wanted to be nearer the enemy and were look- 
ing for a new park. Sheds where artillery horses 
had been sheltered for more than a year were empty; 
camps were being vacated; vast piles of shells must 
follow the guns which the tractors were taking for- 
ward. The nests of spacious dugouts in a hillside 
nicely walled in by sandbags had served their pur- 
pose. They were beyond the range of any German 
guns. 

For the first time you realized what the proces- 
sion which gorged the roads would be like if the 
Western front were actually broken. Guns of every 
caliber from the 75's to the i2o's and 240's, am- 
munition pack trains, ambulances horse-drawn and 



132 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

motor-drawn, big and little motor trucks, staff of- 
ficers' cars, cycle riders and motor cycle riders, small 
two-wheeled carts, all were mixed with the flow of 
infantry going and coming and crowding the road- 
menders off the road. 

There was none of the stateliness of the columns 
of British motor trucks and none of the rigidity of 
British marching. It all seemed a great family af- 
fair. When one wondered what part any item of the 
variegated transport played it was always promptly 
explained.. 

Officers and men exchanged calls of greeting as 
they passed. Eyes were flashing to the accompani- 
ment of gestures. There were arguments about 
right of way in which the fellow with the two- 
wheeled cart held his own with the chauffeur of the 
three-ton motor truck. But the argument was ac- 
companied by action. In some cases it was over, a 
decision made and the block of traffic broken before 
a phlegmatic man could have had discussion fairly 
under way. For Frenchmen are nothing if not 
quick of mind and body and whether a Frenchman 
is pulling or pushing or driving he likes to express 
the emotions of the moment. If a piece of trans- 
port were stalled there would be a chorus of ex- 
clamations and running disputes as to the method 
of getting it out of the rut, with the result that at 
the juncture when an outsider might think that utter 



ALONG THE ROAD TO VICTORY 133 

confusion was to ensue, every Frenchman in sight 
had swarmed to the task under the direction of some- 
body who seemed to have made the suggestion which 
won the favor of the majority. 

Much has been written about the grimness of the 
French in this war. Naturally they were grim in 
the early days; but what impresses me most about 
the French Army whenever I see it is that it is en- 
tirely French. Some people had the idea that when 
the French went to war they would lose their heads, 
run to and fro and dance about and shout. They 
have not acted so in this war and they nev*r have 
acted so in any other war. They still talk with 
eyes, hands and shoulders and fight with them, 
too. 

The tide never halted for long. It flowed on with 
marvelous alacrity and a seeming absence of system 
which soon convinced you as concealing a very ex- 
cellent system. Every man really knew where he 
was going; he could think for himself, French 
fashion. Near the frc."t I witnessed a typical scene 
when an officer ran out and halted a soldier who was 
walking across the fields by himself and demanded 
to know who he was and what he was doing there. 

11 1 am wounded, sir," was the reply, as he 
opened his coat and showed a bandage. " I am 
going to the casualty clearing station and this is the 
shortest way " — not to mention that it was a much 



134 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

easier way than to hug the edge of the road in the 
midst of the traffic. 

The battalions and transport which made up this 
tide of an army's rear trying to catch up with its 
extreme front had a view, as the road dipped into 
a valley, of the trophies which are the proof of 
victory. Here were both guns and prisoners. 
Among the guns nicely parked you might have your 
choice between the latest 77's out of Krupps' and 
pieces of the vintage of the '8o's. One 77 had not 
a blemish; another had its muzzle broken off by 
the burst of a shell, its spokes slashed by shell- 
fragments, and its armored shield, opened by a 
jagged hole, was as crumpled as if made of tin. 

Four of the old fortress type had a history. They 
bore the mark of their French maker. They had 
fired at the Germans from Maubeuge and after hav- 
ing been taken by the Germans were set to fire at 
the French. One could imagine how the German 
staff had scattered such pieces along the line when in 
stalemate warfare any kind of gun that had a barrel 
and could discharge a shell would add to the volume 
of gunfire. 

Such a ponderous piece with its heavy, old-fash- 
ioned trail and no recoil cylinder was never meant 
to play any part in an army of movement. You 
could picture how it had been dragged up into posi- 
tion back of the German trenches and how a crew of 



ALONG THE ROAD TO VICTORY 135 

old Landsturm gunners had been allowed a certain 
number of shells a day and told off to fire them at 
certain villages and crossroads, with that systematic 
regularity of the German artillery system which 
often defeats its own purpose, as we on the Allies' 
side well know. 

Very likely, as often happened, the crew fired six 
rounds before breakfast and eight at four o'clock in 
the afternoon, and the rest of the time they might 
sit about playing cards. Of course, retreat was out 
of the question with a gun of this sort. Yet through 
the twenty months that the opposing armies had 
sniped at each other from the same positions the 
relic had done faithful auxiliary service. The 
French could move it on to some other part of the 
line now where no offensive was expected and some 
old territorials could use it as the old Landsturmers 
had used it. 

All the guns in this park had been taken by the 
Colonial Corps, which thinks itself a little better 
than the Nancy (or Iron) Corps, a view with which 
the Iron Corps entirely disagreed. Scattered among 
the Colonial Corps, whether on the march or in 
billets, were the black men. There is no prejudice 
against the " chocolates," as they are called, who pro- 
vide variation and amusement, not to mention color. 
Most adaptable of human beings is the negro, 
whom you find in all lands and engaged in all kinds 



136 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

of pursuits, reflecting always the character of his 
surroundings. If his French comrades charged he 
would charge and just as far; if they fell back he 
would fall back and just as far. No Frenchman 
could approach the pride of the blacks over those 
captured guns, which brought grins that left only 
half of their ebony countenances as a background 
for the whites of their eyes and teeth. 

The tide of infantry, vehicles and horses flowing 
past must have been a strange world to the German 
prisoners brought past it to the inclosures, when 
they had not yet recovered from their astonishment 
at the suddenness of the French whirlwind attack. 
The day was warm and the ground dry, and those 
prisoners who were not munching French bread were 
lying sardine fashion pillowing their heads on one 
another, a confused mass of arms and legs, dead 
to the world in sleep — a green patch of humanity 
with all the fight out of them, without weapons or 
power of resistance, guarded by a single French 
soldier, while the belligerent energy of war was on 
that road a hundred yards away. 

" They are good Boches, now," said the French 
sentry; " we sha'n't have to take that lot again." 

Boches ! They are rarely called anything else at 
the front. With both French and English this has 
become the universal word for the Germans which 
will last as long as the men who fought in this war 



ALONG THE ROAD TO VICTORY 137 

survive. Though the Germans dislike it that makes 
no difference. They will have to accept it even when 
peace comes, for it is established. One day they 
may come to take a certain pride in it as a distinc- 
tion which stands for German military efficiency 
and racial isolation. The professional soldier ex- 
pressing his admiration of the way the German 
charges, handles his artillery, or the desperate cour- 
age of his machine gun crews may speak of him as 
" Brother Boche " or the " old Boche " in a sort of 
amiable recognition of the fact of how worthy he is 
of an enemy's steel if only he would refrain from 
certain unsportsmanlike habits. 

At length the blue river on the way to the front 
divided at a crossroad and we were out on the plain 
which swept away to the bend of the Somme in 
front of Peronne. Officers returning from the 
front when asked how the battle was going were 
never too preoccupied to reply. It was anybody's 
privilege to ask a question and everybody seemed to 
delight to answer it. I talked with a group of men 
who were washing down their bread with draughts 
of red wine, their first meal after they had been 
through two lines of trenches. Their brigade had 
taken more prisoners than it had had casualties. 
Their dead were few and less mourned because they 
had fallen in such a glorious victory. Rattling talk 
gave gusto to every mouthful. 



138 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

Unlike the English, these victors were articulate ; 
they rejoiced in their experiences and were glad to 
tell about them. If one had fought it out at close 
quarters with a German and got his man, he made 
the incident into a dramatic episode for your edifica- 
tion. It was war; he had been in a charge; he had 
escaped alive; he had won. He liked the thrill of 
his exploit and enjoyed the telling, not allowing it 
to drag, perhaps, for want of a leg. Every French- 
man is more or less of a general, as Napoleon said, 
and every one knew the meaning of this victory. He 
liked to make the most of it and relive it. 

After having seen the trenches that the British 
had taken on the high ground around Fricourt, I 
was the more interested to see those that the French 
had taken on July ist. The British had charged 
uphill against the strongest fortifications that the 
Germans could devise in that chalky subsoil so ad- 
mirably suited for the purpose. Those before the 
French were not so strong and were in alluvial soil 
on the plain. Many of the German dugouts in front 
of Dompierre were in relatively as good condition 
as those at Fricourt, though not so numerous or so 
strong; which meant that the artillery of neither 
army had been able completely to destroy them. 
The ground on the plain permitted of no such ad- 
vantageous tactical points for machine guns as 
those which had confronted the British, in front 



ALONG THE ROAD TO VICTORY 139 

of whom the Germans had massed immense reserves 
of artillery, particularly in the Thiepval-Gomme- 
court sector where the British attack had failed, be- 
sides having the valuable ridge of Bapaume at their 
backs. In front of the French the Germans had 
smaller forces of artillery on the plain where the 
bend of the Somme was at their backs. 

This is not detracting from the French success, 
which was complete and masterful. The coordina- 
tion of artillery and infantry must have been per- 
fect, as you could see when you went over the field 
where there were surprisingly few French dead and 
the German dead, though more plentiful than the 
French, were not very numerous. It seemed that 
the French artillery had absolutely pinioned the 
Germans to their trenches and communication 
trenches in the Dompierre sector and the French 
appearing close under their own shells in a swift 
and eager wave gathered in all the German garrison 
as prisoners. The ruins of the villages might have 
been made either by French, British or German 
artillery. There is true internationalism in artillery 
destruction. 

It was something to see the way that French 
transport and reserves were going right across the 
plain in splendid disregard of any German artillery 
concentration. But, as usual, they knew what they 
were doing. No shells fell among them while I was 



140 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

at the front, and out on the plain where the battle 
still raged the soixante-quinze batteries were as busy 
as knitting-machines working some kind of magic 
which protected that column from tornadoes of the 
same kind that they themselves were. sending. The 
German artillery, indeed, seemed a little demoral- 
ized. Krump-krump-krump, they put a number of 
shells into a group of trees beside the road where 
they mistakenly thought that there was a battery. 
Swish-swish-swish came another salvo which I 
thought was meant for us, but it passed by and 
struck where there was no target. 

I have had glimpses of nearly every feature of 
war, but there was one in this advance which was 
not included in my experiences. The French in- 
fantry was hardly in the first-line German trench 
when the ditch had been filled in and the way was 
open for the soixante-quinze to go forward. For 
the guns galloped into action just as they might 
have done at manceuvers. Some dead artillery horses 
near the old trench line told the story of how a 
German shell must have stopped one of the guns, 
which was small price to pay for so great a privilege 
as — let us repeat — galloping the guns into action 
across the trenches in broad daylight and keeping 
close to the infantry as it advanced from position 
to position on the plain. 

Here was a surviving bit of the glory and the 



ALONG THE ROAD TO VICTORY 141 

sport of war, whose passing may be one of the 
great influences in preventing future wars ; but there 
being war and the French having to win that war, 
why, the spectacle of this marvelous field gun, so 
beloved of its alert and skilful gunners, playing 
the part that was intended for it on the heels of 
the enemy made a thrilling incident in the history 
of modern France. The French had shown on that 
day that they had lost none of their initiative of 
Napoleon's time, just as the British had shown that 
they could be as stubborn and determined as in 
Wellington's. 



XI 

THE BRIGADE THAT WENT THROUGH 

A young brigadier — A regular soldier — No heroics — How his brigade 
charged — Systematically cleaning up the dugouts — " It was 
orders. We did it." — The second advance — Holding on for 
two sleepless days and nights — Soda water and cigars — York- 
shiremen, and a stubborn lot — British phlegm — Five officers out 
of twenty who had " gone through " — Stereotyped phrases and 
inexpressible emotions. 

No sound of the guns was audible in this quiet 
French village where a brigade out of the battle 
line was in rest. The few soldiers moving about 
were looking in the shop windows, trying their 
French with the inhabitants, or standing in small 
groups. Their faces were tired and drawn as the 
only visible sign of the torment of fire that they had 
undergone. They had met everything the German 
had to offer in the way of projectiles and ex- 
plosives; but before we have their story we shall 
have that of the young brigadier-general who had 
his headquarters in one of the houses. His was the 
brigade that went " through," and he was the kind 
of brigadier who would send a brigade " through." 
With its position in the attack of July ist in the 
joint, as it were, between the northern sector where 

142 



BRIGADE THAT WENT THROUGH 143 

the German line was not broken and the southern 
where it was, this brigade had suffered what the 
charges which failed had suffered and it had known 
the triumph of those which had succeeded, at a cost 
in keeping with the experience. 

The brigadier was a regular soldier and nothing 
but a soldier from head to foot, in thought, in 
manner and in his decisive phrases. Nowadays, 
when we seem to be drawing further and further 
away from versatility, perhaps more than ever we 
like the soldier to be a soldier, the poet to be a poet, 
the surgeon to be a surgeon ; and I can even imagine 
this brigadier preferring that if another man was 
to- be a pacifist he should be a real out and out 
pacifist. You knew at a glance without asking that 
he had been in India and South Africa, that he was 
fond of sport and probably fond of fighting. He 
had rubbed up against all kinds of men, as the 
British officer who has the inclination may do in the 
course of his career, and his straight eye — an eye 
which you would say had never been accustomed to 
indefiniteness about anything — must have impressed 
the men under his command with the confidence 
that he knew his business and that they must 
follow him. Yet it could twinkle on occasion with 
a pungent humor as he told his story, which did not 
take him long but left you long a-thinking. A writer 
who was as good a writer as he was a soldier if he 



i 4 4 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

had had the same experience could have made a 
book out of it; but then he could not have been a 
man of action at the same time. 

He made it clear at once that he had not led his 
brigade in person over the parapet, or helped in 
person to bomb the enemy's dugouts, or indulged in 
any other kind of gallery play. I do not think that 
all the drawing-rooms in London or all the recep- 
tion committees which receive gallant sons in their 
home towns could betray him into the faintest simu- 
lation of the pose of a hero. He was not a hero and 
he did not believe in heroics. His occupation was 
commanding men and taking trenches. 

Not once did he utter anything approaching a 
boast over a feat which his friends and superiors 
had expected of him. This would be " swank," as 
they call it, only he would characterize it by even a 
stronger word. He is the kind of officer, the work- 
ing, clear-thinking type, who would earn promo- 
tion by success at arms in a long war, while the 
gallery-play crowd whose promotion and favors 
come by political gift and academic reports in time 
of peace would be swept into the dustbin. He was 
simply a capable fighter ; and war is fighting. 

His men had gone over the " lid " in excellent 
fashion, quite on time. He had seen at once what 
they were in for, but he had no doubt that they would 
keep on, for he had warned them to expect machine 



BRIGADE THAT WENT THROUGH 145 

gun fire and told them what to do in case it came. 
They applied the system in which he had trained 
them with a coolness that won his approbation as 
a directing expert — his matter-of-fact approbation 
in the searching analysis of every detail, with no 
ecstasies about their unparalleled gallantry. He ex- 
pected them to be gallant. However, I could im- 
agine that if you said a word against them his eyes 
would flash indignation. They were his men and 
he might criticize them, but no one else might except 
a superior officer. The first wave reached the first- 
line German trench on time, that is, half of them 
did; the rest, including more than half of the of- 
ficers, were down, dead or wounded, in No Man's 
Land in the swift crossing of two hundred yards of 
open space. 

He had watched their advance from the first-line 
British trench. Later, when the situation demanded 
it, I learned that he went up to the captured German 
line and on to the final objective, but this fact was 
drawn out of him. It might lead to a misunder- 
standing; you might think that he had been taking 
as much risk as his officers and men, and risk of 
any kind for him was an incident of the business of 
managing a brigade. 

" How about the dugouts? " I asked. 

This was an obvious question. The trouble on 
July 1st had been ? as we know, that the Germans 



146 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

hiding in their dugouts had rushed forth as soon as 
the British curtain of fire lifted and sometimes 
fought the British in the trench traverses with 
numbers superior. Again, they had surrendered, 
only to overpower their guards, pick up rifles and 
man their machine guns after the first wave had 
passed on, instead of filing back across No Man's 
Land in the regular fashion of prisoners. 

" I was looking out for that," said the brigadier, 
like a lawyer who has stated his opponent's case; 
but other commanders had taken the same precau- 
tions with less fortunate results. When he said that 
he was " looking out for that " it meant, in his case, 
that he had so thoroughly organized his men — and 
he was not the only brigadier who had, he was a 
type — in view of every emergency in " cleaning up " 
that the Germans did not outwit them. The half 
which reached the German trench had the situation 
fully in hand and details for the dugouts assigned 
before they went on. And they did go on. This 
was the wonderful thing. 

" With your numbers so depleted, wasn't it a 
question whether or not it was wise for you to at- 
tempt to carry out the full plan? " 

He gave me a short look of surprise. I realized 
that if I had been one of the colonels and made 
such a suggestion I should have drawn a curtain of 
fire upon myself. 



BRIGADE THAT WENT THROUGH 147 

"It was orders," he said, and added: "We did 
it." 

- Yes, they did it — when commanding officers, 
majors and senior captains were down, when com- 
panies without any officers were led by sergeants 
and even by corporals who knew what to do, thanks 
to their training. 

In order to reach the final objective the survivors 
of the first charge which had gone two hundred 
yards to the first line must cover another thousand, 
which must have seemed a thousand miles; but that 
was not for them to consider. The spirit of the 
resolute man who had drilled them, if not his pres- 
ence, was urging them forward. They reached the 
point where the landmarks compared with their map 
indicated their stopping place — about one-quarter of 
the number that had left the British trench. 

They had enough military sense to realize that 
if they tried to go back over the same ground which 
they had crossed there might be less than one- 
quarter of the fourth remaining. They preferred 
to die with their faces rather than their backs to the 
enemy. No, they did not mean to die. They meant 
to hold on and " beat the Boche," according to their 
teaching. 

As things had been going none too well with the 
brigade on their left their flank was exposed. They 
met this condition by fortifying themselves against 



148 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

enfilade in an old German communication trench 
and rushing other points of advantage to secure 
their position. When a German machine gun was 
able to sweep them, a corporal slipped up another 
communication trench and bombed it out of business. 
Running out of bombs of their own, they began 
gathering German bombs which were lying about 
plentifully and threw these at the Germans. Short 
of rifle ammunition they found that there was am- 
munition for the German rifles which had been cap- 
tured. They were not choice about their methods 
and neither were the Germans in that cheek-by-jowl 
affair with both sides so exhausted that a little 
more grit on one side struck the balance in its 
favor. 

This medley of British and Germans in a world 
of personal combat shared shell fire, heat and 
misery. The British sent their rocket signals up to 
say that they had arrived. In two or three other 
instances the signals had meant that a dozen men 
only had reached their objective, a force unable to 
hold until reinforcements could come. Not so this 
time. The little group held; they held even when 
the Germans got some fresh men and attempted a 
counter-attack; they held until assistance came. For 
two sleepless days and nights under continual fire 
they remained in their dearly won position until, 
under cover of darkness, they were relieved. 



BRIGADE THAT WENT THROUGH 149 

In the most tranquil of villages the survivors 
looking in shop windows and trying out their 
French might wonder how it was that they were 
alive, though they were certain that their brigadier 
thought well of them. Ask them or their officers 
what they thought of their brigadier and they were 
equally certain of that, too. Theirs was the best 
brigadier in the army. Think what this kind of 
confidence means to men in such an action when their 
lives are the pawns of his direction ! 

I felt a kind of awe in the presence of one of the 
battalions in billet in a warehouse, more than in the 
presence of prime ministers or potentates. Most of 
them were blinking and mind-stiff after having slept 
the clock around. They were Yorkshiremen, chiefly 
workers in worsted mills and a stubborn lot. 

" What did you most want to do when you got 
out of the fight? " I asked. 

They spoke with one voice which left no question 
of their desires in a one-two-three order. They 
wanted a wash, a shave, a good meal, and then sleep. 
And personal experiences? Tom called on Jim and 
Jim had bayoneted two Germans, he said; then Jim 
called on Bill, who had had a wonderful experience 
according to Jim, though all that Bill made of it 
was that he got there first with his bombs. Told 
among themselves the stories might have been thrill- 
ing. Before a stranger they were mere official re- 



150 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

ports. It had been quick work, too quick for 
anything but to dodge for cover and act promptly 
in your effort to get the other fellow before he got 
you. 

Generically, they had a job to do and they did 
it just as they would have done one in the factories 
at home. They were not so interested in any ex- 
hibition of courage as in an encounter which had the 
element of sport. Each narrator invariably re- 
turned to the subject of soda water. The outstand- 
ing novelty of the charge to these men was the 
quantity of soda water in bottles which they had 
found in the German dugouts. They went on to 
their second objective with bottles of soda water in 
their pockets and German light cigars in the corners 
of their mouths and stopped to drink soda water 
between bombing rushes after they had arrived. It 
was a hot, thirsty day. 

Through the curtains of artillery fire which were 
continually maintained back of their new positions 
supplies could not be brought up, but Boche pro- 
visions saved the day. In fact, I think this was one 
of the reasons why they felt almost kindly toward 
the Germans. They found the canned meat excel- 
lent, but did not care for the " K.K." bread. 

Thus in the dim light of the warehouse they 
talked on, making their task appear as a half- 
holiday of sport. It seemed to me that this was in 



BRIGADE THAT WENT THROUGH 151 

keeping with their training; the fashionable attitude 
of the British soldier toward a horrible business. If 
this helps him to endure what these men had en- 
dured without flinching, with comrades being blown 
to bits around them by shell-bursts, why, then, it is 
the attitude best suited to develop the fighting 
quality of the British. They had it from their 
officers who, in turn, perhaps, had it in part from 
such British regulars as the brigadier, though mostly 
I think that it was inborn racial phlegm. 

I met the five officers who were the survivors of 
the twenty in one battalion, the five who had " carried 
through." One was a barrister, another just out of 
Oxford, a third, as I remember, a real estate broker 
in a small town. They told their stories without a 
gesture, quite as if they were giving an account of 
a game of golf. It might have seemed callous, but 
you knew better. 

You knew when they said that it was " a bit stiff," 
or " a bit thick," or " it looked as if they had us," 
what inexpressible emotion lay behind the accepted 
army phrases. The truth was they would not permit 
themselves to think of the void in their lines made 
by the death of their comrades. They had drawn 
the curtain on all incidents which had not the 
appeal of action and finality as a part of the business 
of " going through." One officer with a twitch of 
the lips remarked almost casually that new officers 



152 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

and drafts were arriving and that it would seem 
strange to see so many new faces in the mess. 

Those of their old comrades who were not dead 
were already in hospital in England. When an of- 
ficer who had been absent joined the group he 
brought the news that one of their number who had 
been badly hit would live. The others' quiet ejacu- 
lation of "Good! " had a thrill back of it which 
communicated its joy to me. Eight of the wounded 
had not been seriously hit, which meant that these 
would return and that, after all, only four were dead. 
This was the first intimate indication I had of how 
the offensive exposing the whole bodies of men in 
a charge against the low-velocity shrapnel bullets 
and high-velocity bullets from rifles and machine 
guns must result in the old ratio of only one mortal 
wound for every five men hit. 

There was consolation in that fact. It was an- 
other advantage of the war of movement as com- 
pared with the war of shambles in trenches. And 
none, from the general down to the privates, had 
really any idea of how glorious a part they had 
played. They had merely " done their bit " and 
taken what came their way — and they had " gone 
through." 



XII 

THE STORMING OF CONTALMAISON 

The mighty animal of war makes ready for another effort — New 
charts at headquarters — The battle of the Somme the battle of 
woods and villages — A terrible school of war in session — 
Mametz — A wood not " thinned "—The Quadrangle — Marooned 
Scots — '"Softening" a village — Light German cigars — Going 
after Contalmaison — Aeroplanes in the blue sky — Midsummer 
fruitfulness and war's destruction — Making chaos of a village 
— Attack under cover of a wall of smoke — A melodrama under 
the passing shells. 

If the British and the French could have gone on 
day after day as they had on July ist they would 
have put the Germans out of France and Belgium 
by autumn. Arrival at the banks of the Rhine and 
even the taking of Essen would have been only a 
matter of calculation by a schedule of time and dis- 
tance. After the shock of the first great drive in 
which the mighty animal of war lunged forward, it 
had to stretch out its steel claws to gain further 
foothold and draw its bulky body into position for 
another huge effort. Wherever the claws moved 
there were Germans, who were too wise soldiers to 
fall back supinely on new lines of fortifications and 
await the next general attack. They would parry 
every attempt at footholds of approach for launch- 

153 



154 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

ing it; pound the claws as if they were the hands 
of an invader grasping at a window ledge. 

At headquarters there was a new chart with dif- 
ferent colored patches numbered by the days of the 
month beginning July ist, each patch indicating the 
ground that had been won on that day. Compare 
their order with a relief map and in one-two-three 
fashion you were able to grasp the natural tactical 
sequence; how one position was taken in order to 
command another. Sometimes, though, they repre- 
sented the lines of least resistance. Often the real 
generals were the battalions on the battle front 
who found the weak points and asked permission to 
press on. The principle was the same as water find- 
ing its level as it spreads from a reservoir. 

I have often thought that a better name for the 
battle of the Somme would be the battle of woods 
and villages. Their importance never really dawned 
on the observer until after July ist. Or, it might 
be called the battle of the spade. Give a man an 
hour with a spade in that chalky subsoil and a few 
sandbags and he will make a fortress for himself 
which only a direct hit by a shell can destroy. He 
ducks under the sweep of bullets when he is not 
firing and with his steel helmet is fairly safe from 
shrapnel while he waits in his lair until the other 
fellow comes. 

Thus the German depended on the machine gun 



STORMING OF CONTALMAISON 155 

and the rifle to stop any charge which was not sup- 
ported by artillery fire sufficient to crush in the 
trenches and silence his armament. When it was, he 
had his own artillery to turn a curtain of fire onto 
the charge in progress and to hammer the enemy if 
he got possession. This was obviously the right 
system — in theory. But the theory did not always 
work out, as we shall see. Its development through 
the four months that I watched the Somme battle 
was only less interesting than the development of 
offensive tactics by the British and the French. 
Every day this terrible school of war was in session, 
with a British battalion more skilful and cunning 
every time that it went into the firing-line. 

Rising out of the slopes toward the Ridge in 
green patches were three large woods, not to men- 
tion small ones, under a canopy of shell-smoke, 
Mametz, Bernafay and Trones, with their orgies of 
combat hidden under their screens of foliage. They 
recall the Wilderness — a Wilderness lasting for 
days, with only one feature of the Wilderness lack- 
ing which was a conflagration, but with lachryma- 
tory and gas shells and a few other features that 
were lacking in Virginia. In the next war we may 
have still more innovations. Ours is the ingenious 
human race. 

It is Mametz with an area of something over two 
hundred acres that concerns us now. The Germans 



156 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

thought highly of Mametz. They were willing to 
lose thousands of lives in order to keep it in their 
possession. For two years it had not been 
thinned according to French custom; now shells 
and bullets were to undertake the task which had 
been neglected. So thick was the undergrowth that 
a man had to squeeze his way through and an enemy 
was as well ambushed as a field mouse in high 
grass. 

The Germans had run barriers of barbed wire 
through the undergrowth. They had their artillery 
registered to fringe the woods with curtains of fire 
and machine guns nestling in unseen barricades and 
trenches. Through the heart of it they had a light 
railway for bringing up supplies. All these details 
had been arranged in odd hours when they were not 
working on the main first- and second-line fortifica- 
tions during their twenty months of preparation. I 
think they must have become weary at times of so 
much " choring," judging by a German general's 
order after his inspection of the second line, in 
which he said that the battalions in occupation were 
a lazy lot who were a disgrace to the Fatherland. 
After the battle began they could add to the de- 
fenses improvements adapted to the needs of the 
moment. Of course, large numbers of Germans 
were killed and wounded by British shell fire in the 
process of " thinning " out the woods; but that was 



STORMING OF CONTALMAISON 157 

to be expected, as the Germans learned during the 
battle of the Somme. 

How the British ever took Mametz Wood I do 
not understand; or how they took Trones Wood 
later, for that matter. A visit to the woods only- 
heightened perplexity. I have seen men walk over 
broken bottles with bare feet, swallow swords and 
eat fire and knew that there was some trick about it, 
as there was about the taking of Mametz. 

The German had not enough barbed wire to go 
all the way around the woods, or, at least, British 
artillery would not let him string any more and 
he thought that the British would attack where 
they ought to according to rule; that is, by the 
south. Instead, they went in by the west, where the 
machine guns were not waiting and the heavy guns 
were not registered, as I understand it. A piece of 
strategy of that kind might have won a decisive 
battle in an old-time war, but I confess that it did 
not occur to me to ask who planned it when I heard 
the story. Strategists became so common on the 
Somme that everybody took them as much for 
granted as that every battalion had a commander. 

Mametz was not taken with the first attack. The 
British were in the woods once and had to come out; 
but they had learned that before they could get a 
proper point d'appui they must methodically " clean 
up" a small grove, a neighboring cemetery, an in- 



158 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

tricate maze of trenches called the Quadrangle, and 
a few other outlying obstacles. In the first rush 
a lot of Tyneside Scots were marooned from joining 
in the retreat. They fortified themselves in German 
dugouts and waited in siege, these dour men of the 
North. When the British returned eighty of the 
Scots were still full of fight if short of food and 
" verra well " otherwise, thank you. At times they 
had been under blasts of shells from both sides, 
and again they had been in an oasis of peace, with 
neither British nor German gunners certain whether 
they would kill friend or foe. 

Going in from the west while the Germans had 
their curtains of fire registered elsewhere, the British 
grubbed their way in one charge through most of 
Mametz and when night fell in the midst of the 
undergrowth, with a Briton not knowing whether it 
was Briton or German lying on the other side of a 
tree-trunk, they had the satisfaction of possessing 
four big guns which the Germans had been unable 
to withdraw, and had ascertained also that the Ger- 
mans had a strong position protected by barbed wire 
at the northern end of the woods. 

" This will require a little thinking," as one 
English officer said, " but of course we shall 
take it." 

The purchase on Mametz and the occupation of 
Bailiff's Wood, the Quadrangle, La Boisselle and 



STORMING OF CONTALMAISON 159 

Ovillers-la-Boisselle brought the circle of advancing 
British nearer to Contalmaison, which sat up on 
the hills in a sea of chalk seams. Contalmaison was 
being gradually " softened " by the artillery. The 
chateau was not yet all down, but after each bite by 
a big shell less of the white walls was visible when 
the clouds of smoke from the explosion lifted. Bit 
by bit the guns would get the chateau, just as bit 
by bit a stonemason chips a block down to the 
proper dimensions to fit it into place in a foun- 
dation. 

A visit to La Boisselle on the way to Contal- 
maison justified the expectation as to what was in 
store for Contalmaison. I saw the blackened and 
shell-whittled trunks of two trees standing in La 
Boisselle. Once with many others they had given 
shade in the gardens of houses; but there were no 
traces of houses now except as they were mixed with 
the earth. The village had been hammered into 
dust. Yet some dugouts still survived. Keeping at 
it, the British working around these had eventually 
forced the surrender of the garrison, who could not 
raise their heads to fire without being met by a bullet 
or a bomb-burst from the watchful besiegers. 

11 Slow work, but they had to come out," was the 
graphic phrase of one of the captors, " and they 
looked fed up, too. They had even run out of 
cigars " — which settled it. 



160 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

Oh, those light German cigars ! Sometimes I be- 
lieve that they were the real mainstay of the Ger- 
man organization. Cigars gone, spirit gone! I 
have seen an utterly weary German prisoner as he 
delivered his papers to his captor bring out his last 
cigar and thrust it into his mouth to forestall its 
being taken as tribute, with his captor saying with 
characteristic British cheerfulness, " Keep it, Bochy! 
It smells too much like a disinfectant for me, but 
let's have your steel helmet " — the invariable prize 
demanded by the victor. 

The British had already been in Contalmaison, 
but did not stay. " Too many German machine 
guns and too much artillery fire and not enough 
men," to put it with colloquial army brevity. It 
often happened that a village was entered and parts 
of it held during a day, then evacuated at night, 
leaving the British guns full play for the final 
" softening." These initial efforts had the result of 
reconnoissances in force. They permitted a thor- 
ough look around the enemy's machine gun positions 
so as to know how to avoid their fire and " do them 
in," revealed the cover that would be available for 
the next advance, and brought invaluable informa- 
tion to the gunners for the accurate distribution of 
their fire. Always some points important for future 
operations were held. 

" We are going after Contalmaison this after- 



STORMING OF CONTALMAISON 161 

noon," said a staff officer at headquarters, " and if 
you hurry you may see it." 

As a result, I witnessed the most brilliant scene of 
battle of any on the Somme, unless it was the taking 
of Combles. There was bright sunshine, with the 
air luminously clear and no heat waves. From my 
vantage point I could see clear to the neighborhood 
of Peronne. The French also were attacking; the 
drumhead fire of their soixante-quinze made a con- 
tinuous roll, and the puffs of shrapnel smoke hung 
in a long, gossamery cloud fringing the horizon and 
the canopy of the green ridges. 

Every aeroplane of the Allies seemed to be aloft, 
each one distinct against the blue with shimmering 
wings and the soft, burnished aureole of the pro- 
pellers. They were flying at all heights. Some 
seemed almost motionless two or three miles above 
the earth, while others shot up from their aero- 
dromes. 

Planes circling, planes climbing, planes slipping 
down aerial toboggan slides with propellers still, 
planes going as straight as crows toward the German 
line to be lost to sight in space while others devel- 
oped out of space as swift messengers bound for 
home with news of observations, planes touring a 
sector of the front, swooping low over a corps head- 
quarters to drop a message and returning to their 
duty; planes of all types, from the monsters with 



1 62 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

vast stretch of wing and crews of three or more 
men, stately as swans, to those gulls, the saucy little 
Nieuports, shooting up and down and turning with 
incredible swiftness, their tails in the air; planes and 
planes in a fantastic aerial minuet, flitting around 
the great sausage balloons stationary in the still 
air. 

With ripening grain and sweet-smelling harvests 
of clover and hay in the background and weeds and 
wild grass in the foreground, the area of vegetation 
in the opulence of midsummer was demarked from 
the area of shell-craters, trenches and explosions. 
You had the majesty of battle and the desolation of 
war; nature's eternal seeding and fruiting alongside 
the most ruthless forms of destruction. In the clear 
air the black bursts of the German high explosives 
hammering Mametz Wood, as if in revenge for its 
loss, seemed uglier and more murderous than usual; 
the light smoke of shrapnel had a softer, more lin- 
gering quality; soldiers were visible distinctly at a 
great distance in their comings and goings; the water 
carts carrying water up to the first line were a kind 
of pilgrim circuit riders of that thirsty world of 
deadly strife ; a file of infantry winding up the slope 
at regular intervals were silhouettes as like as beads 
on a string. The whole suggested a hill of ants 
which had turned their habits of industry against 
an invader of their homes in the earth, and the 



STORMING OF CONTALMAISON 163 

columns of motor trucks and caissons ever flowing 
from all directions were as a tide, which halted at 
the foot of the slope and then flowed back. 

There were shell-bursts wherever you looked, 
with your attention drawn to Contalmaison as it 
would be to a gathering crowd in the thick of city 
traffic. All the steel throats in clumps of woods, 
under cover of road embankments, in gullies and on 
the reverse side of slopes, were speaking. The guns 
were giving to Contalmaison all they had to give 
and the remaining walls of the chateau disappeared 
in a fog like a fishing smack off the Grand Banks. 
Super-refined, man-directed hell was making sportive 
chaos in the village which it hid with its steaming 
breath cut by columns of black smoke from the 
H.E.'s and crowned with flashes of shrapnel; and 
under the sun's rays the gases from the powder 
made prismatic splendor in flurries and billows shot 
with the tints of the rainbow. 

Submerging a simple farming hamlet in this kind 
of a tempest was only part of the plan of the gun- 
ners, who cut a pattern of fire elsewhere in keeping 
with the patterns of the German trenches, placing a 
curtain of fire behind the town and another on the 
edge, and at other points not a curtain but steady 
hose-streams of fire. Answering German shells re- 
vealed which of the chalky scars on the slope was 
the British first-line trench, and from this, as steam 



1 64 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

from a locomotive runs in a flying plume along the 
crest of a railway cutting, rose a billowing wall of 
smoke which was harmless, not even asphyxiating, 
its only purpose being to screen the infantry attack, 
with a gentle breeze sweeping it on into the mantle 
over Contalmaison as the wind carries the smoke of 
a prairie fire. Lookout Mountain was known as the 
battle in the clouds, where generals could not see 
what their troops were doing. Now all battles are 
in a cloud. 

From the first-line British trench the first wave 
of the British attack moved under cover of the 
smoke-screen and directly you saw that the shells 
had ceased to fall in Contalmaison. Its smoke 
mantle slowly lifting revealed fragmentary walls of 
that sturdy, defiant chateau still standing. Another 
wave of British infantry was on its way. Four waves 
in all were to go in, each succeeding one with its set 
part in supporting the one in front and in mastering 
the dugouts and machine gun positions that might 
have survived. 

With no shells falling in Contalmaison, the bomb 
and the bayonet had the stage to themselves, a 
stage more or less hemmed in by explosions and with 
a sweep of projectiles from both sides passing over 
the heads of the caste in a melodrama which had 
" blessed little comedy relief," as one soldier put it. 
The Germans were already shelling the former Brit- 



STORMING OF CONTALMAISON 165 

ish first line and their supports, while the British 
maintained a curtain of fire on the far side of the 
village to protect their infantry as it worked its way 
through the debris, and any fire which they had to 
spare after lifting it from Contalmaison they were 
distributing on different strong points, not in cur- 
tains but in a repetition of punches. It was the best 
artillery work that I had seen and its purpose seemed 
that of a man with a stick knocking in any head that 
appeared from any hole. 

Act III. now. The British curtain of fire was 
lifted from the far edge of the village, which meant 
that the infantry according to schedule should be in 
possession of all of the village. But they might not 
stay. They might be forced out soon after they 
sent up their signals. When the Germans turned 
on a curtain of fire succeeding the British fire this 
was further evidence of British success sufficient to 
convince any skeptic. The British curtain was placed 
beyond it to hold off any counter-attack and prevent 
sniping till the new occupants of the premises had 
" dug themselves in." 

The Germans had not forgotten that it was their 
turn now to hammer Contalmaison, through which 
they thought that British reserves and fresh supplies 
of bombs must come; and I saw one of the first 
11 krumps " of this concentration take another bite 
out of the walls of the chateauo 



1 66 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

By watching the switching of the curtains of fire 
I had learned that this time Contalmaison was defi- 
nitely held; and though they say that I don't know 
anything about news, I beat the communique on the 
fact as the result of my observation, which ought at 
least to classify me as a " cub " reporter. 



XIII 

A GREAT NIGHT ATTACK 

Following hard blows with blows — Trones Woods — Attack and 
counter-attack — A heavy price to pay — " The spirit that 
quickeneth " knew no faltering — Second-line German fortifica- 
tions — A daringly planned attack — " Up and at them! " — An at- 
tack not according to'the scientific factory system — The splendid 
and terrible hazard — Gun flashes in the dark numerous as fire- 
flies — Majestic, diabolical, beautiful — A planet bombarding 
with aerolites — Signal flares in the distance — How far had the 
British gone? — Sunrise on the attack — Good news that day. 

Of all the wonderful nights at the front that of 
July 1 3th- 1 4th was distinctive for its incomparable 
suspense. A great experiment was to be tried; at 
least, so it seemed to the observer, though the staff 
did not take that attitude. It never does once it 
has decided upon any daring enterprise. When you 
send fifty thousand men into a charge that may fail 
with a loss of half of their number or may brilliantly 
succeed with a loss of only five per cent., none from 
the corps commanders and division commanders, 
who await results after the plans are made, down 
to the privates must have any thought except that 
the plan is right and that it will go through. 

There is no older military maxim than to follow 
up any hard blow with other blows, in order that 

167 



1 68 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

the enemy may have no time to recuperate; but in 
moving against a frontal line under modern condi- 
tions the congestion of transport and ammunition 
which must wait on new roads and the filling in of 
captured trenches makes a difficult problem in or- 
ganization. Never had there been and never were 
there necessary such numbers of men and such quan- 
tities of material as on the Somme front. 

The twelve days succeeding July ist had seen 
the taking of minor position after position by local 
concentrations of troops and artillery fire, while the 
army as a whole had been preparing for another big 
attack at the propitious moment when these pre- 
liminary gains should justify it. 

Half a tactical eye could see that the woods of 
Mametz, Bernafay and Trones must be held in order 
to allow of elbow room for a mass movement over 
a broad front. The German realized this and after 
he had lost Mametz and Bernafay he held all the 
more desperately to Trones, which, for the time 
being, was the superlative horror in woods fighting, 
though we were yet to know that it could be sur- 
passed by Delville and High Woods. 

In Trones the Germans met attack with counter- 
attack again and again. The British got through to 
the east side of the woods, and in reply the Germans 
sent in a wave forcing the British back to the west, 
but no farther. Then the British, reinforced again, 



A GREAT NIGHT ATTACK 169 

reached the east side. Showers of leaves and splin- 
ters descended from shell-bursts and machine guns 
were always rattling. The artillery of both sides 
hammered the approaches of the woods to prevent 
reinforcements from coming up. 

In the cellars of Guillemont village beyond Trones 
the Germans had refuges for concentrating their re- 
serves to feed in more troops, whose orders, as all 
the prisoners taken said, were to hold to the last man. 
Trones Wood was never to be yielded to the British. 
Its importance was too vital. Grim national and 
racial pride and battalion pride and soldierly pride 
grappled in unyielding effort and enmity. The middle 
of the woods became a neutral ground where the 
wounded of the different sallies lay groaning from 
pain and thirst. Small groups of British had dug 
themselves in among the Germans and, waterless, 
foodless, held out, conserving their ammunition or, 
when it was gone, waiting for the last effort with 
the bayonet. 

For several days the spare British artillery had 
been cutting the barbed wire of the second line and 
smashing in the trenches ; and the big guns which had 
been advanced since July 1st were sending their 
shells far beyond the Ridge into villages and cross- 
roads and other vital points, in order to interfere 
with German communications. 

The Thiepval-Gommecourt line where the British 



170 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

had been repulsed on July ist had reverted to some- 
thing approaching stalemate conditions, with the 
usual exchange of artillery fire, and it was along the 
broader front where the old German first line had 
been broken through that the main concentrations 
of men and guns were being made in order to con- 
tinue the advance for the present through the open- 
ing won on July ist. The price paid for the taking 
of the woods and for repeated attacks where initial 
attacks had failed might seem to the observer — 
unless he knew that the German losses had been 
equally heavy if not heavier since July ist — dispro- 
portionate not only to the ground gained but also to 
general results up to this time which, and this was 
most important, had demonstrated, as a promise 
for the future, that the British New Army could at- 
tack unremittingly and successfully against seasoned 
German troops in positions which the Germans had 
considered impregnable. 

" The spirit that quickeneth " knew no faltering. 
Battle police were without occupation. There were 
no stragglers. With methodical, phlegmatic steadi- 
ness the infantry moved up to the firing-line when 
its turn came. 

The second-line German fortifications, if not as 
elaborate, were even better situated than the first; 
not on the crest of the Ridge, of course, where they 
would be easily swept by artillery blasts, but 



A GREAT NIGHT ATTACK 171 

where the latest experience demonstrated that they 
could make the most of the commanding high 
ground with the least exposure. Looking through 
my glasses I could see the portion of the open knoll 
stretching from Longueval to High Wood which 
was to be the object of the most extensive effort 
since July 1st. 

As yet, except in trench raids over narrow fronts, 
there had been no attempt to rush a long line under 
cover of darkness because of the difficulty of the 
different groups keeping touch and identifying their 
objectives. 

The charge of July 1st had been at seven-thirty 
in the morning. Contalmaison had been stormed in 
the afternoon. Fricourt was taken at midday. 
When the bold suggestion was made that over a 
three-mile front the infantry should rush the second- 
line trenches in the darkness, hoping to take the 
enemy by surprise, it was as daring a conception 
considering the ground and the circumstances as 
ever came to the mind of a British commander and 
might be said to be characteristic of the dash and 
so-called " foolhardiness " of the British soldier, 
accustomed to " looking smart " and rushing his 
enemy from colonial experiences. Nelson had the 
" spirit that quickeneth " when he turned his blind 
eye to the enemy. The French, too, are for the 
attack. It won Marengo and Austerlitz. No gen- 



172 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

eral ever dared more than Frederick the Great, not 
even Caesar. Thus the great races of history have 
won military dominion. 

"Up and at them!" is still the shibboleth in 
which the British believe, no less than our pioneers 
and Grant and Stonewall Jackson believed in it, and 
nothing throughout the Somme battle was so char- 
acteristically British as not only the stubbornness of 
their defense when small parties were surrounded, 
but the way in which they would keep on attacking 
and the difficulty which generals had not in encour- 
aging initiative but in keeping battalions and bri- 
gades from putting into practice their conviction 
that they could take a position on their own account 
if they could have a chance instead of waiting on 
a systematic advance. 

Thus, an attack on that second line on the Ridge 
after the Germans had had two weeks of further 
preparation was an adventure of an order, in the 
days of mechanical transport, aeroplanes and indirect 
artillery fire when all military science is supposed to 
be reduced to a factory system, worthy of the days 
of the sea-rovers and of Clive, of Washington's 
crossing of the Delaware or of the storming of 
Quebec, when a bold confidence made gamble for 
a mighty stake. 

So, at least, it seemed to the observer, though, as 
I said, the staff insisted that it was a perfectly normal 



A GREAT NIGHT ATTACK 173 

operation. The Japanese had made many success- 
ful night attacks early in the Russo-Japanese war, 
but these had been against positions undefended by 
machine gun fire and curtains of artillery fire. When 
the Japanese reached their objective they were not 
in danger of being blasted out by high explosives 
and incidentally they were not fighting what has 
been called the most highly trained army on earth 
on the most concentrated front that has ever been 
known in military history. 

But " Up and at them! " Sir Douglas Haig, who 
had "all his nerve with him," said to go ahead. 
At three-thirty a.m., a good hour before dawn, that 
wave of men three miles long was to rush into the 
night toward an invisible objective, with the dark- 
ness so thick that they could hardly recognize a 
figure ten yards away. Yet as one English soldier 
said, " You could see the German as soon as he 
saw you and you ought to be able to throw a bomb 
as quickly as he and a bayonet would have just as 
much penetration at three-thirty in the morning as 
at midday." 

When I saw the battalions who were to take part 
in the attack marching up I realized, as they did 
not, the splendid and terrible hazard of success or 
failure, of life or death, which was to be theirs. 
Along the new roads they passed and then across 
the conquered ground, its uneven slopes made more 



174 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

uneven by continued digging and shell fire, and dis- 
appeared, and Night dropped her curtain on the field 
with no one knowing what morning would reveal. 

The troops were in position; all was ready; all 
the lessons learned from the attack of July ist were 
to be applied. At midnight there was no movement 
except of artillery caissons; gunners whose pieces 
two hours later were to speak with a fury of blasts 
were sound asleep beside their ammunition. The 
absolute order in this amazing network of all kinds 
of supplies and transport contributed to the sus- 
pense. Night bombardments we had already seen, 
and I would not dwell on this except that it had the 
same splendor by night that the storming of Con- 
talmaison had by day. 

The artillery observer for a fifteen-inch gun was 
a good-humored host. He was putting his " bit," 
as the British say, into Bazentin-le-Petit village and 
the only way we knew where Bazentin was in the 
darkness was through great flashes of light which 
announced the bursting of a fifteen-hundred-pound 
shell that had gone hurtling through the air with 
its hoarse, ponderous scream. All the slope up to 
the Ridge was merged in the blanket of night. Out 
of it came the regular flashes of guns for a while 
as the prelude to the unloosing of the tornado before 
the attack. 

Now that we saw them all firing, for the first time 



A GREAT NIGHT ATTACK 175 

we had some idea of the number that had been 
advanced into the conquered territory since July 1st. 
The ruins and the sticks of trees of Fricourt and 
Mametz with their few remaining walls stood out 
spectral in the flashes of batteries that had found 
nesting places among the debris. The whole slope 
had become a volcanic uproar. One might as well 
have tried to count the number of fireflies over a 
swamp as the flashes. The limitation of reckoning 
had been reached. Guns ahead of us and around 
us and behind us as usual, in a battle of competitive 
crashes among themselves, and near by we saw the 
figures of the gunners outlined in instants of weird 
lightning glow, which might include the horses of 
a caisson in a flicker of distinct silhouette flashed 
out of the night and then lost in the night, with 
the riders sitting as straight as if at drill. Every 
voice had one message, "This for the Ridge!" 
which was crowned by hell's tempest of shell-bursts 
to prepare the way for the rush by the infantry at 
" zero." 

The thing was majestic, diabolical, beautiful, ab- 
surd — anything you wished to call it. Look away 
from the near-by guns where the faces of the gunners 
were illumined and you could not conceive of the 
scene as being of human origin; but mixing awed 
humility with colossal egoism in varying compounds 
of imagination and fact, you might think of your 



176 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

little group of observers as occupying a point of 
view in space where one planet hidden in darkness 
was throwing aerolites at another hidden in dark- 
ness striking it with mighty explosions, and the 
crashes and screams were the sound of the missiles 
on their unlighted way. 

It was still dark when three-thirty came and 
pyrotechnics were added to the display, which I could 
not think of as being in any sense pyrotechnical, 
when out of the blanket as signals from the planet's 
surface in the direction of some new manoeuver ap- 
peared showers of glowing red sparks, which rose 
to a height of a hundred feet with a breadth of 
thirty or forty feet, it seemed at that distance. One 
shower was in the neighborhood of Ovillers, one at 
La Boisselle and one this side of Longueval. Then 
in the distance beyond Longueval the sky was il- 
lumined by a great conflagration not on the fire- 
works program, which must have been a German 
ammunition dump exploded by British shells. 

It was our planet, now, and a particular portion 
of it in Picardy. No imaginative translation to 
space could hold any longer. With the charge going 
in, the intimate human element was supreme. The 
thought of those advancing waves of men in the 
darkness made the fiery display a dissociated ob- 
jective spectacle. On the Ridge more signal flares 
rose and those illumining the dark masses of foliage 



A GREAT NIGHT ATTACK 177 

must be Bazentin Wood gained, and those beyond 
must be in the Bazentin villages, Little Bazen- 
tin and Big Bazentin, though neither of them, 
like most of the villages, numbering a dozen to 
fifty houses could be much smaller and be called 
villages. 

This was all the objective. Yes, but though the 
British had arrived, as the signals showed, could 
they remain? It seemed almost too good to be 
true. And that hateful Trones Wood? Had we 
taken that, too, as a part of the tidal wave of a 
broad attack instead of trying to take it piecemeal? 

Our suspense was intensified by the thought that 
this action might be the turning-point in the first 
stage of the great Somme battle. We strained our 
eyes into the darkness studying, as a mariner studies 
the sky, the signs with which we had grown familiar 
as indicative of results. There was a good augury 
in the comparatively slight German shell fire in re- 
sponse, though we were reminded that it might at 
any minute develop with sudden ferocity. 

Now the flashes of the guns grew dim. A trans- 
formation more wonderful than artillery could pro- 
duce, that of night into day, was in process. Not a 
curtain but the sun's ball of fire, undisturbed by 
any efforts of the human beings on a few square 
miles of earth, was holding to his schedule in as 
kindly a fashion as ever toward planets which kept 



178 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

at a respectful distance from his molten artillery 
concentration. 

Out of the blanket which hid the field appeared 
the great welts of chalk of the main line trenches, 
then the lesser connecting ones; the woods became 
black patches and the remaining tree-trunks gaunt, 
still and dismal sentinels of the gray ruins of the 
villages, until finally all the conformations of the 
scarred and tortured slope were distinct in the first 
fresh light of a brilliant summer's day. Where the 
blazes had been was the burst of black smoke from 
shells and we saw that it was still German fire along 
the visible line of the British objective, assuring us 
that the British had won the ground which they had 
set out to take and were holding it. 

" Up and at them! " had done the trick this time, 
and trick it was; a trick or stratagem, to use the 
higher sounding word ; a trick in not waiting on the 
general attack for the taking of Trones according 
to obvious tactics, but including Trones in the 
sweep; a trick in the daring way that the infantry 
was sent in ahead of the answering German curtain 
of fire. 

All the news was good that day. The British 
had swept through Bazentin Wood and taken the 
Bazentin villages. They held Trones Wood and 
were in Delville and High Woods. A footing was 
established on the Ridge where the British could 



A GREAT NIGHT ATTACK 179 

fight for final mastery on even terms with the enemy. 
" Slight losses " came the reports from corps and 
divisions and confirmation of official reports was 
seen in the paucity of the wounded arriving at the 
casualty clearing stations and in the faces of officers 
and men everywhere. Even British phlegm yielded 
to exhilaration. 



XIV 

THE CAVALRY GOES IN 

The " dodo " band — Cavalry a luxury — Cavalry, however, may not 
be discarded — What ten thousand horse might do — A taste of 
action for the cavalry — An " incident " — Horses that had the 
luck to " go in " — Cavalrymen who showed signs of action — 
The novelty of a cavalry action — A camp group — Germans 
caught unawares — Horsemen and an aeroplane — Retiring in 
good order — Just enough casualties to give the fillip of danger 
to recollection. 

Sometimes a squadron of cavalry, British or Indian, 
survivors of the ardent past, intruded in a me- 
chanical world of motor trucks and tractors drawing 
guns. With outward pride these lean riders of 
burnished, sleek horses, whose broad backs bore gal- 
lantly the heavy equipment, concealed their irrita- 
tion at idleness while others fought. They brought 
picturesqueness and warm-blooded life to the scene. 
Such a merciless war of steel contrivances needed 
some ornament. An old sergeant one day, when 
the cavalry halted beside his battalion which was 
resting, in an exhibit of affectionate recollection ex- 
claimed : 

" It's good to stroke a horse's muzzle again! I 
was in the Dragoon Guards once, myself." 

Sometimes the cavalry facetiously referred to 
1 80 



THE CAVALRY GOES IN 181 

itself as the " Dodo " band, with a galling sense 
of helplessness under its humor; and others had 
thought of it as being like the bison preserved in 
the Yellowstone Park lest the species die out. 

A cynical general said that a small force of 
cavalry was a luxury which such a vast army of 
infantry and guns might afford. In his opinion, 
even if we went to the Rhine, the cavalry would melt 
in its first charge under the curtains of fire and 
machine gun sprays of the rearguard actions of the 
retreating enemy. He had never been in the cav- 
alry, and any squadron knew well what he and all 
of those who shared his views were thinking when- 
ever it passed over the brow of a hill that afforded 
a view of the welter of shell fire over a field cut with 
shell-craters and trenches which are pitfalls for 
horses. Yet it returned gamely and with fastidious 
application to its practice in crossing such obstacles 
in case the command to " go in " should ever come. 
Such preparations were suggestive to extreme 
skeptics of the purchase of robes and the selection 
of a suitable hilltop of a religious cult which has 
appointed the day for ascension. 

Excepting a dash in Champagne, not since trench 
warfare began had the cavalry had any chance. The 
thought of action was an hypothesis developed from 
memory of charges in the past. Aeroplanes took the 
cavalry's place as scouts, machine guns and rifles 



1 82 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

emplaced behind a first-line trench which had suc- 
cumbed to an attack took its place as rearguard, and 
aeroplane patrols its place as screen. 

Yet any army, be it British, French, or German, 
which expected to carry through an offensive would 
not turn all its cavalry into infantry. This was 
parting with one of the old three branches of horse, 
foot and gun and closing the door to a possible 
opportunity. If the Japanese had had cavalry ready 
at the critical moment after Mukden, its mobility 
would have hampered the Russian retreat, if not 
turned it into a rout. When you need cavalry you 
need it " badly," as the cowboy said about his six- 
shooter. 

Should the German line ever be broken and all 
that earth-tied, enormous, complicated organization, 
with guns emplaced and its array of congested am- 
munition dumps and supply depots, try to move on 
sudden demand, what added confusion ten thousand 
cavalry would bring! What rich prizes would 
await it as it galloped through the breach and in 
units, separating each to its objective according to 
evolutions suited to the new conditions, dismounted 
machine guns to cover roads and from chosen 
points sweep their bullets into wholesale targets! 
The prospect of those few wild hours, when any 
price in casualties might be paid for results, was the 
inspiration of dreams when hoofs stamped in camps 



THE CAVALRY GOES IN 183 

at night or bits champed as lances glistened in line 
above khaki-colored steel helmets on morning 
parade. 

A taste, just a taste, of action the cavalry was to 
have, owing to the success of the attack of July 14th, 
which manifestly took the Germans by surprise be- 
tween High and Delville Woods and left them 
staggering with second-line trenches lost and con- 
fusion ensuing, while guns and scattered battalions 
were being hurried up by train in an indiscriminate 
haste wholly out of keeping with German methods 
of prevision and precision. The breach was narrow, 
the field of action for horses limited; but word came 
back that over the plateau which looked away to 
Bapaume between Delville and High Woods there 
were few shell-craters and no German trenches or 
many Germans in sight as day dawned. 

Gunners rubbed their eyes at the vision as they 
saw the horsemen pass and infantry stood amazed 
to see them crossing trenches, Briton and Indian on 
their way up the slope to the Ridge. How they 
passed the crest without being decimated by a cur- 
tain of fire would be a mystery if there, were any 
mysteries in this war, where everything seems to be 
worked out like geometry or chemical formulae. The 
German artillery being busy withdrawing heavy 
guns and the other guns preoccupied after the 
startling results of an attack not down on the 



1 84 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

calendar for that day did not have time to " get 
on " the cavalry when they were registered on differ- 
ent targets — which is suggestive of what might 
come if the line were cleft over a broad front. A 
steel band is strong until it breaks, which may be in 
many pieces. 

"Did you see the charge?" you ask. No, nor 
even the ride up the slope, being busy elsewhere 
and not knowing that the charge was going to take 
place. I could only seek out the two squadrons who 
participated in the " incident," as the staff called it, 
after it was over. Incident is the right word for 
a military sense of proportion. When the public in 
England and abroad heard that the cavalry were 
" in " they might expect to hear next day that the 
Anglo-French Armies were in full pursuit of the 
broken German Armies to the Rhine, when no such 
outcome could be in the immediate program unless 
German numbers were cut in two or the Prussian 
turned Quaker. 

An incident ! Yes, but something to give a gallop 
to the pen of the writer after the monotony of gun- 
fire and bombing. I was never more eager to hear 
an account of any action than of this charge— a 
cavalry charge, a charge of cavalry, if you please, 
on the Western front in July, 191 6. 

In one of the valleys back of the front out of 
sight of the battle there were tired, tethered horses 



THE CAVALRY GOES IN 185 

with a knowing look in their eyes, it seemed to me, 
and a kind of superior manner toward the sleek, 
fresh horses which had not had the luck to " go in " ; 
and cavalrymen were lying under their shelters fast 
asleep, their clothing and accoutrements showing the 
unmistakable signs of action. We heard from their 
officers the story of both the Dragoon Guards 
and the Deccan Horse (Indian) who had 
known what it was to ride down a German in the 
open. 

The shade of Phil Sheridan might ponder on what 
the world was coming to that we make much of such 
a small affair; but he would have felt all the glow- 
ing satisfaction of these men if he had waited as 
long as they for any kind of a cavalry action. The 
accounts of the two squadrons may go together. Of- 
ficers were shaving and aiming for enough water to 
serve as a substitute for a bath. The commander 
with his map could give you every detail with a fond, 
lingering emphasis on each one, as a battalion com- 
mander might of a first experience in a trench raid 
when later the same battalion would make an ac- 
count of a charge in battle which was rich with 
incidents of hand-to-hand encounters and prisoners 
breached from dugouts into an " I-came-I-saw " nar- 
rative, and not understand why further interest 
should be shown by the inquirer in what was the 
everyday routine of the business of war. For the 



1 86 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

trite saying that everything is relative does not for- 
feit any truth by repetition. 

The cavalry had done everything quite according 
to tactics, which would only confuse the layman. 
The wonder was that any of it had come back 
alive. On that narrow front it had ridden out 
toward the Germany Army with nothing between the 
cavalry and the artillery and machine guns which had 
men on horses for targets. In respect to days when 
to show a head above a trench meant death the 
thing was stupefying, incredible. These narrators 
forming a camp group, with lean, black-bearded, 
olive-skinned Indians in attendance bringing water 
in horse-buckets for the baths, and the sight of 
kindly horses' faces smiling at you, and the officers 
themselves horsewise and with the talk and manner 
of horsemen — only they made it credible. How 
real it was to them ! How real it became to me ! 

There had been some Germans in hiding in the 
grass who were taken unawares by this rush of 
gallopers with lances. Every participant agreed as 
to the complete astonishment of the enemy. It was 
equivalent to a football player coming into the field 
in ancient armor and the more of a surprise con- 
sidering that those Germans had been sent out after 
a morning full of surprises to make contact with 
the British and reestablish the broken line. 

Not dummies of straw this time for the lance's 



THE CAVALRY GOES IN 187 

sharp point, but startled men in green uniform — -- 
the vision which had been in mind when every thrust 
was made at the dummies ! This was what cavalry- 
was for, the object of all the training. It rode 
through quite as it would have ridden fifty or a 
hundred years ago. A man on the ground, a man 
on a horse ! This feature had not changed. 

" You actually got some? " 

"Oh, yes!" 

" On the lances?" 

" Yes." 

From the distance came the infernal sound of 
guns in their threshing contest of explosions which 
made this incident more impressive than any ac- 
count of a man buried by shells, of isolated groups 
holding out in dugouts, or of venturesome soldiers 
catching and tossing back German bombs at the man 
who threw them, because it was unique on the 
Somme. Both British and Indians had had the 
same kind of an opportunity. After riding through 
they wheeled and rode back in the accepted fashion 
of cavalry. 

By this time some of the systematic Germans had 
recollected that a part of their drill was how to 
receive a cavalry charge, and when those who had 
not run or been impaled began firing and others 
stood ready with their bayonets but with something 
of the manner of men who were not certain whether 



188 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

they were in a trance or not, according to the ac- 
count, a German machine gun began its wicked stac- 
cato as another feature of German awakening to 
the situation. 

This brings us to the most picturesque incident of 
the " incident." Most envied of all observers of 
the tournament was an aviator who looked down 
on a show bizarre even in the annals of aviation. 
The German planes had been driven to cover, which 
gave the Briton a fair field. A knightly admiration, 
perhaps a sense of fellowship not to say sympathy 
with the old arm of scouting from the new, possessed 
him; or let it be that he could not resist a part in 
such a rare spectacle which was so tempting to sport- 
ing instinct. He swooped toward that miserable, 
earth-tied turtle of a machine gun and emptied his 
drum into it. He was not over three hundred feet, 
all agree, above the earth, when not less than ten 
thousand feet was the rule. 

"It was jolly fine of him! " as the cavalry put 
it. To have a charge and then to have that happen 
— well, it was not so bad to be in the cavalry. The 
plane drew fire by setting all the Germans to firing 
at it without hitting it, and the machine gun, whether 
silenced or not, ceased to bother the cavalry, which 
brought back prisoners to complete a well-rounded 
adventure before withdrawing lest the German 
guns, also entering into the spirit of the situation, 



THE CAVALRY GOES IN 189 

should blow men and horses off the Ridge instead 
of leaving them to retire in good order. 

Casualties : about the same number of horses as 
men. Riders who had lost their horses mounted 
riderless horses. A percentage of one in six or seven 
had been hit, which was the most amazing part of 
it; indeed, the most joyful part, completing the like- 
ness to the days when war still had the element of 
sport. There had been killed and wounded or it 
would not have been a battle, but not enough to 
cast a spell of gloom; just enough to be a part of 
the gambling hazard of war and give the fillip of 
danger to recollection. 



XV 

ENTER THE ANZACS 

Newfoundland sets the pace — Australia and New Zealand lands 
that breed men — Australians " very proud, individual men " — 
Geographical isolation a cause of independence — The "An- 
zacs' " idea of righting — Sir Charles Birdwood — How he 
taught his troops discipline — Bean and Ross — Difference be- 
tween Australians and New Zealanders — The Australian uni- 
form and physique — A dollar and a half a day — General Bird- 
wood and his men — Australian humor. - 

It was British troops exclusively which started the 
Grand Offensive if we except the Newfoundland bat- 
talion which alone had the honor of representing 
the heroism of North America on July ist; for 
people in passing the Grand Banks which makes 
them think of Newfoundland are wont to regard it 
as a part of Canada, when it is a separate colony 
whose fishermen and frontiersmen were attached to 
a British division that went to Gallipoli with a 
British brigade and later shared the fate of British 
battalions in the attack on the Thiepval-Gommecourt 
sector. 

On that famous day in Picardy the Newfound- 
landers advanced into the smoke of the curtains of 
fire unflinchingly and kept on charging the machine 

190 



ENTER THE ANZACS 191 

guns. Survivors and the wounded who crept back 
at night across No Man's Land had no need to 
trumpet their heroism. All the army knew it. New- 
foundland had set the pace for the other clans from 
oversea. 

It was British troops, too, which took Contal- 
maison and Mametz, Bernafay and Trones Woods 
and who carried out all the attack of July 15th, 
with the exception of the South African bri- 
gade which stormed Delville Wood with the 
tearing enthusiasm of a rush for a new diamond 
mine. 

Whenever the troops from oversea are not men- 
tioned you may be sure that it is the British, the 
home troops, who are doing the fighting, their num- 
ber being about ten to one of the others with the one 
out of ten representing double the number of those 
who fought on either side in any great pitched battle 
in our Civil War. After the Newfoundlanders and 
South Africans, who were few but precious, the Aus- 
tralians, an army of themselves, came to take their 
part in the Somme battle. 

I have never been in Australia or New Zealand, 
but this I know that when the war is over I am 
going. I want to see the land that breeds such men. 
They are free men if ever there were such; free 
whether they come from town or from bush. I had 
heard of their commonwealth ideas, their State- 



192 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

owned utilities, their socialistic inclinations, which 
might incline you to think that they were all of the 
same State-cut pattern of manhood; but I had 
heard, too, how they had restricted immigration of 
Orientals and limited other immigration by method 
if not by law, which was suggestive of a tendency 
to keep the breed to itself, as I understood from 
my reading. 

Whenever I saw an Australian I thought: " Here 
is a very proud, individual man," but also an Aus- 
tralian, particularly an Australian. Some people 
thought that there was a touch of insolence in his 
bearing when he looked you straight in the eye as 
much as to say: " The best thing in the world is to 
be an upstanding member of the human race who is 
ready to prove that he is as good as any other. If 

you don't think so, well " There was no doubt 

about the Australian being brave. This was as self- 
evident as that the pine is straight and the beech 
is hard wood. 

The Australians came from a great distance. 
This you knew without geographical reference. Far 
away in their island continent they have been work- 
ing out their own destiny, not caring for interfer- 
ence from the outside. To put it in strong language, 
there is a touch of the " I don't care a rap for any- 
body who does not care a rap for me " in their 
extreme moments of independence. It is refreshing 



ENTER THE ANZACS 193 

that a whole population may have an island 
continent to themselves and carry on in this 
fashion. 

They had had an introduction to universal 
service which was also characteristic of their democ- 
racy and helpful in time of war. The " Anzac " 
had caught the sense of its idea (before other 
English-speaking people) not to let others do your 
fighting for you but all " join in the scrum." Ori- 
entals might crave the broad spaces of a new land, 
in which event if they ever took Australia and New 
Zealand they would not be bothered by many sur- 
vivors of the white population, because most of the 
Anzacs would be dead — this being particularly the 
kind of people the Anzacs are as I knew them in 
France, which was not a poor trial ground of their 
quality. 

When they went to Gallipoli it was said that 
they had no discipline; and certainly at first disci- 
pline did irritate them as a snaffle bit irritates a high- 
spirited horse. " Little Kitch," as the stalwart 
Anzacs called the New Army Englishman, thought 
that they broke all the military commandments 
of the drill-grounds in a way that would be their 
undoing. I rather think that it might have been 
the undoing of Little Kitch, with his stubborn, 
methodical, phlegmatic, "stick-it" courage; but 
after the Australians had fought the Turk a while 



194 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

it was evident that they knew how to fight, and their 
general, Sir Charles Birdwood, supplied the disci- 
pline which is necessary if fighting power is not to 
be wasted in misplaced emotion. 

Lucky Birdwood to command the Australians 
and lucky Australians to have him as commander ! It 
was he who in choosing a telegraph code word 
made up " Anzac " for the Australian-New Zealand 
corps, which at once became the collective term for 
the combination. What a test he put them to and 
they put him to ! He had to prove himself to them 
before he could develop the Anzacs into a war unit 
worthy of their fighting quality. Such is democracy 
where man judges man by standards, set, in this 
case, by Australian customs. 

When he understood them he knew why he was 
fortunate. He was one of them and at the same 
time a stiff disciplinarian. They objected to saluting, 
but he taught them to salute in a way that did not 
make saluting seem the whole thing— this was what 
they resented — but a part of the routine. It was 
said that he knew every man in the corps by name, 
which shows how stories will grow around a com- 
mander who rises at five and retires at midnight 
and has a dynamic ubiquity in keeping in touch with 
his men. Such a force included some " rough cus- 
tomers " who might mistake war for a brawler's 
opportunity; but Sir Charles had a way with them 



ENTER THE ANZACS 195 

that worked out for their good and the good of the 
corps. 

Though they were of a free type of democracy, 
the Australian government, either from inherent 
sense or as the result of distance, as critics might 
say, or owing to General Birdwood's gift of having 
his way, did not handicap the Australians as heavily 
as they might have been handicapped under the cir- 
cumstances by officers who were skilful in politics 
without being skilful in war. 

As publicist the Australians had Bean, a trained 
journalist, a red-headed blade of a man who was 
an officer among officers and a man among men 
and held the respect of all by Australian quali- 
ties. If there could be only one chronicler allowed, 
then Bean's choice had the applause of a corps, 
though Bean says that Australia is full of just as 
good journalists who did not have his luck. The 
New Zealanders had Ross to play the same part 
for them with equal loyalty and he was as much of 
a New Zealander as Bean was an Australian. 

For, make no mistake, though the Australians and 
the New Zealanders might seem alike to the ob- 
server as they marched along a road, they are not, 
as you will find if you talk with them. The New 
Zealanders have islands of their own, not to men- 
tion that the Tasmanians have one, too. Besides, 
the New Zealanders include a Maori battalion and 



196 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

of all aborigines of lands where the white races have 
settled in permanence to build new nations, the 
Maoris have best accustomed themselves to civiliza- 
tion and are the highest type — a fact which every 
New Zealander takes as another contributing factor 
to New Zealand's excellence. Quiet men the New 
Zealanders, bearing themselves with the pride of 
Guardsmen whose privates all belong to superior 
old families, and New Zealanders every minute of 
every hour of the day, though you might think that 
civil war was imminent if you started them on a dis- 
cussion about home politics. 

Give any unit of an army some particular, readily 
distinguishable symbol, be it only a feather in the 
cap or a different headgear, and that lot becomes 
set apart from the others in a fashion that gives 
them esprit de corps. With the Scots it is the kilt 
and the different plaids. All the varied uniforms 
of regiments of the armies of olden days had this 
object. Modern war requires neutral tones and 
its necessary machinelike homogeneity may look 
askance at too much rivalry among units as tending 
toward each one acting by itself rather than in co- 
operation with the rest. 

All the forces at the front except the Anzacs were 
in khaki and wore caps when not wearing steel hel- 
mets in the trenches or on the firing-line. The Aus- 
tralians were in slate-colored uniform and they wore 



ENTER THE ANZACS 197 

looped-up soft hats. The hats accentuated the 
manner, the height and the sturdiness of the men 
whose physique was unsurpassed at the British 
front, and practically all were smooth-shaven. For 
generations they had had adequate nutrition and 
they had the capacity to absorb it, which genera- 
tions from the slums may lack even if the food is 
forthcoming. 

There was no reason why every man in Aus- 
tralia should not have enough to eat and, whether 
bush or city dweller, he was fond of the open air 
where he might exercise the year around. He had 
blown his lungs; he had fed well and came of a 
daring pioneer stock. When an Anzac battalion 
under those hats went swinging along the road it 
seemed as if the men were taking the road along 
with them, such was their vigorous tread. On leave 
in London they were equally conspicuous. Some- 
times they used a little vermilion with the generosity 
of men who received a dollar and a half a day as 
their wage. It was the first time, in many instances, 
that they had seen the " old town " and they had 
come far and to-morrow might go back to France 
for the last time. 

My first view of them in the trenches after they 
came from Gallipoli was in the flat country near 
Ypres whose mushiness is so detested by all soldiers. 
They had been used to digging trenches in dry hill- 



198 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

sides, where they might excavate caves with solid 
walls. Here they had to fill sandbags with mud and 
make breastworks, which were frequently breached 
by shell fire. At first, they had been poor diggers; 
but when democracy learns its lesson by individual 
experience it is incorporated in every man and no 
longer is a question of orders. Nov/ they were 
deepening communication trenches and thickening 
parapet walls and were mud-plastered by their 
labor. 

Having risen at General Birdwood's hour of five 
to go with him on inspection I might watch his 
methods, and it means something to men to have 
their corps commander thus early among them when 
a drizzly rain is softening the morass under foot. 
He stopped and asked the privates how they were 
in a friendly way and they answered with straight- 
away candor. Then he gave some directions about 
improvements with a we-are-all-working-together 
suggestiveness, but all the time he was the general. 
These privates were not without their Australian 
sense of humor, which is dry; and in answer to the 
inquiry about how he was one said : 

" All right, except we'd like a little rum, sir." 
In cold weather the distribution of a rum ration 
was at the disposition of a commander, who in most 
instances did not give it. This stalwart Australian 
evidently had not been a teetotaler. 



ENTER THE ANZACS 199 

" We'll give you some rum when you have made 
a trench raid and taken some prisoners," the gen- 
eral replied. 

" It might be an incentive, sir! " said the soldier 
very respectfully. 

" No Australian should need such an incentive! " 
answered the general, and passed on. 

"Yes, sir!" was the answer of another soldier 
to the question if he had been in Gallipoli. 

"Wounded?" 

11 Yes, sir." 

"How?" 

" I was examining a bomb, sir, to find out how it 
was made and it went off to my surprise, sir ! " 

There was not even a twinkle of the eye accom- 
panying the response, yet I was not certain that this 
big fellow from the bush had been wounded in that 
way. I suspected him of a quiet joke. 

" Throw them at the Germans next time," said 
the general. 

"Yes, sir. It's safer!" 

Returning after that long morning of character- 
istic routine, as we passed through a village where 
Australians were billeted one soldier failed to salute. 
When the general stopped him his hand shot up in 
approved fashion as he recognized his commander 
and he said contritely, with the touch of respect of 
a man to the leader in whom he believes ; 



200 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

" I did not see that it was you, sir ! " 

The general had on a mackintosh with the collar 
turned up, which concealed his rank. 

" But you might see that it was an officer." 

" Yes, sir." 

" And you salute officers." 

" Yes, sir." 

Which he would hereafter now that it was Gen- 
eral Birdwood's order, though this everlasting rais- 
ing of your hand, as one Australian said, made you 
into a kind of human windmill when the world was 
so full of officers. Gradually all came to salute, 
and when an Australian salutes he does it in a way 
that is a credit to Australia. 

After a period of fighting a tired division retired 
from the battle front and a fresh one took the place. 
Thus, following the custom of the circulation of 
troops by the armies of both sides, whether at Verdun 
or on the Somme, the day arrived when along the 
road toward the front came the Australian bat- 
talions, hardened and disciplined by trench warfare, 
keen-edged in spirit, and ready for the bold task 
which awaited them at Pozieres. This time the 
New Zealanders were not along. 



XVI 

THE AUSTRALIANS AND A WINDMILL 

The windmill upon the hill — Pozieres — Its topography — Warlike in- 
tensity of the Australians — A " stiff job " — An Australian 
chronicler — Incentives to Australian efficiency — German com- 
plaint that the Australians came too fast — Clockwork ef- 
ficiency — Man-to-man business — Sunburned, gaunt battalions 
from the vortex — The fighting on the Ridge — Mouquet Farm — 
A contest of individuality against discipline — " Advance, Aus- 
tralia!" — New Zealanders — South Africans. 

When I think of the Australians in France I always 
think of a windmill. This is not implying that they 
were in any sense Quixotic or that they tilted at a 
windmill, there being nothing left of the windmill 
to tilt at when their capture of its ruins became the 
crowning labor of their first tour on the Somme 
front. 

In their progress up that sector of the Ridge the 
windmill came after Pozieres, as the ascent of the 
bare mountain peak comes after the reaches below 
the timber line. Pozieres was beyond La Boisselle 
and Ovillers-la-Boisselle, from which the battle 
movement swung forward at the hinge of the point 
where the old first-line German fortifications had 
been broken on July ist. 

To think of Pozieres will be to think of the 

201 



202 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

Australians as long as the history of the Somme 
battle endures. I read an interview in a New York 
paper with the Chief of Staff of the German Army 
opposite the British in which he must have been cor- 
rectly quoted, as his remarks passed the censorship. 
He said that the loss of Pozieres was a blunder. I 
liked his frankness in laying the blame on a subordi- 
nate who, if he also had spoken, might have men- 
tioned the presence of the Australians as an 
excuse, which, personally, I think is an excellent 
one. 

Difficult as it now becomes to keep any sequence 
in the operations when, at best, chronology ceases to 
be illuminative of phases, it is well here to explain 
that the attack of July 15th had not gained the 
whole Ridge on the front ahead of the broad 
stretch of ruptured first line. Besides, the Ridge is 
not like the roof of a house, but a most illusive 
series of irregular knolls with small plateaus or val- 
leys between, a sort of miniature broken tableland. 
The foothold gained on July 15th meant no broad 
command of vision down the slope to the main val- 
ley on the other side. Even a shoulder five or ten 
feet higher than the neighboring ground meant a 
barrier to artillery observation which shells would 
not blast away; and the struggle for such positions 
was to go on for weeks. 

Pozieres, then, was on the way to the Ridge and 



AUSTRALIANS AND A WINDMILL 203 

its possession would put the formidable defenses 
of Thiepval in a salient, thus enabling the British to 
strike it from the side as well as in front, which is 
the aim of all strategy whether it works in mobile 
divisions in an open field or is biting and tearing its 
way against field fortifications. Therefore, the 
Germans had good reason to hold Pozieres, which 
protected first-line trenches that had required twenty 
months of preparation. Wherever they could keep 
the Briton or the Frenchman from forcing the fight 
into the open which made the contest an even one 
in digging, they were saving life and ammunition by 
nests of redoubts and dugouts. 

The reason that the Australians wanted to take 
Pozieres was not so tactical as human in their 
minds. It was the village assigned to them and they 
wished to investigate it immediately and get estab- 
lished in the property that was to be theirs, once 
they took it, to hold in. trust for the inhabitants. I 
had a fondness for watching them as they marched 
up to the front looking unreal in their steel helmets 
which they wore in place of the broad-brimmed 
hats. There was a sort of warlike intensity about 
them which may come from the sunlight of an 
island continent reflecting the histrionic adaptability 
of appearances to the task in hand. 

Their first objective was to be the main street. 
They had a " stiff job " ahead, as everybody agreed, 



20 4 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

and so had the British troops operating on their 
right. 

" This objective business has a highly educated 
sound, which might limit martial enthusiasm," said 
one Australian. " As I understand it, that's the line 
where we stop no matter how good the going and 
which we must reach no matter how hard the 
going." 

Precisely. An Australian battalion needed a warn- 
ing in the first instance lest it might keep on advanc- 
ing, which meant that commanders would not know 
where it was in the shell-smoke and it might get 
" squeezed " for want of support on the right and 
left, as I have explained elsewhere. Certainly, 
warning was unnecessary in the second instance 
about the hard going. 

Bean has all the details of the taking of Pozieres; 
he knows what every battalion did, and I was going 
to say what every soldier did. When the Australians 
were in he was in making notes and when they 
were out he was out writing up his notes. His was 
intimate war correspondence about the fellows who 
came from all the districts of his continent, his home 
folks. I am only expressing the impressions of one 
who had glimpses of the Australians while the bat- 
tle was raging elsewhere. 

Of course, skeptics had said that Gallipoli was 
one thing and the Somme another and the Australian 



AUSTRALIANS AND A WINDMILL 205 

man-to-man method might receive a shock from 
Prussian system; but, then, skeptics had said that 
the British could not make an army in two years. 
The Australians knew what was in the skeptics' 
minds, which was further incentive. They had a 
general whom they believed in and they did not 
admit that any man on earth was a better man than 
an Australian. And their staff? Of course, when 
it takes forty years to make a staff how could the 
Australians have one that could hold its own with 
the Germans? And this was what the Austra- 
lians had to do, staff and man: beat the Ger- 
mans. 

When with clockwork promptness came the report 
that they had taken all of their objectives it showed 
that they were up to the standard of their looks and 
their staff signals were working well. They had a 
lot of prisoners, too, who complained that the 
Australians came on too fast. Meanwhile, they 
were on one side of the street and the Germans on 
the other, hugging debris and sniping at one another. 
Now the man-to-man business began to count. The 
Australian got across the street; he went after the 
other fellow; he made a still hunt of it. This bat- 
tle had become a personal matter which pleased 
their sense of individualism; for it is not bred into 
Australians to be afraid if they are out alone after 
dark. 



206 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

Having worked beyond their first objective, when 
they were given as their second the rest of the vil- 
lage they took it; and they were not "biffed" out 
of it, either. What was the use of yielding ground 
when you would have to make another charge in 
order to regain what had been lost? They were not 
that kind of arithmeticians, they said. They be- 
lieved in addition not subtraction in an offensive 
campaign. 

So they stuck, though the Germans made repeated 
daring counter-attacks and poured in shell fire from 
the guns up Thiepval way and off Bapaume way 
with hellish prodigality. For the German staff was 
evidently much out of temper about the " blunder " 
and for many weeks to come were to continue pound- 
ing Pozieres. If they could not shake the Aus- 
tralian out of the village they meant to make him 
pay heavy taxes and to try to kill his reliefs and stop 
his supplies. How the Australians managed to get 
food and men up through the communication 
trenches under the unceasing inferno over that bare 
slope is tribute to their skill in slipping out and in 
between its blasts. 

Not only were they able to hold, but they kept on 
attacking. Every day we heard that they had taken 
more ground and whenever we went out to have a 
look the German lines were always a little farther 
back. One day we were asking if the Australians 



AUSTRALIANS AND A WINDMILL 207 

were in the cemetery yet; the next day they were and 
the next they had more of it as they worked their 
way uphill, fighting from grave to grave; and the 
next day they had mastered all of it, thanks to a 
grim persistence which some had said would not 
comport with their highstrung temperament. 

The windmill was a landmark crowning the 
Ridge; as fair a target as ever artillery ranged on 
— a gunner's delight. After having been knocked 
into splinters the splinters were spread about by 
high explosives which reduced the stone base to 
fragments. 

Sunburned, gaunt battalions came out of the vor- 
tex for a turn of rest. With helmets battered by 
shrapnel bullets, after nights in the rain and broil- 
ing hot days, their faces grimy and unshaven, their 
clothes torn and spotted, they were still Australians 
who looked you in the eye with a sense of having 
proved their birthright as free men. Sometimes the 
old spirit incited by the situation got out of bonds. 
One night when a company rose up to the charge 
the company next in line called out, " Where are you 
going?" and on the reply, "We've orders to take 
that trench in front," the company that had no 
orders to advance exclaimed, " Here, we're going 
to join in the scrum! " and they did, taking more 
trench than the plan required. 

The fierce period of the battle was approaching 



208 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

when fighting on the Ridge was to be a bloody, 
wrestling series of clinches. Now trenches could 
not be dug on that bold, treeless summit. As soon 
as an aeroplane spotted a line developing out of the 
field of shell-craters the guns filled the trench and 
then proceeded to pound it into the fashionable 
style for farming land on the Ridge. 

Trenches out of the question, it became a war 
among shell-craters. Here a soldier ensconced him- 
self with rifle and bombs or a machine gunner deep- 
ened the hole with his spade for the gun. This was 
" scrapping " to the Australians' taste. It called for 
individual nerve and daring on that shell-swept, 
pestled earth, creeping up to new positions or back 
for water and food by night, lying " doggo " by 
day and waiting for a counter-attack by the Ger- 
mans, who were always the losers in this grim, 
stealthy advance. 

In Mouquet Farm the Germans had dugouts 
whose elaborateness was realized only after they 
were taken. A battalion could find absolute security 
in them. Long galleries ran back to entrances in 
areas safe from shell fire. Overhead no semblance 
of farm buildings was left by British and Australian 
guns. When I visited the ruins later I could not 
tell how many buildings there had been; and 
Mouquet Farm was not the only strong point that 
the Germans had to fall back on, let it be said. In 



AUSTRALIANS AND A WINDMILL 209 

the underground tunnels and chambers the Ger- 
mans gathered for their counter-attacks, which they 
attempted with something of their old precision and 
courage. 

This was the opportunity of the machine gunners 
in shell-craters and the snipers and the curtain 
of artillery fire. Sometimes the Australians allowed 
the attack to get good headway. They even left 
gaps in their lines for the game to enter the net 
before they began firing; and again, when a broken 
German charge sought flight its remnants faced an 
impassable curtain of fire which fenced them in and 
they dropped into shell-craters and held up their 
hands, which was the only thing to do. 

Soon the Germans learned, too, how to make the 
most of shell-craters. The harder the Australians 
fought the greater the spur to German pride not 
to be beaten by these supposedly undisciplined, un- 
trained men. The Germans called for more guns 
and got them. Mouquet Farm became a fortress 
of machine guns. It was not taken by the Aus- 
tralians — their successors took what was left of it. 
The nearer they came to the crest which was their 
supreme goal the ghastlier and more concentrated 
grew the shell fire, as the German guns had only to 
range on the skyline. But this equally applied to 
Australian gunners as the Germans were crowded 
toward the summit where the debris of the wind- 



210 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

mill remained, till finally they had to fall back to 
the other side. 

Then they tried sweeping over the Ridge from 
the cover of the reverse slope in counter-attacks, 
only to be whipped by machine gun fire, lashed by 
shrapnel and crushed by high explosives — them- 
selves mixed with the ruins of the windmill. At 
last they gave up the effort. It was not in German 
discipline to make any more attempts. 

The Australians had the windmill as much as 
anyone had it as, for a time, it was in No Man's 
Land where blasts of shells would permit of no 
occupation. But the symbol for which it stood was 
there in readiness as a jumping-off place for the 
sweep-down into the valley later on when the 
Canadians should take the place of the Australians; 
and before they retired they could look in triumph 
across at Thiepval and down on Courcelette and 
Martinpuich and past the valley to Bapaume. 

The development of the campaign had given the 
Australians work suited to their bent when this war 
of machinery, attaining its supreme complexity on 
the Somme, left the human machine between walls 
of shell fire to fight it out individually against the 
human machine, in a contest of will, courage, audac- 
ity, alertness and resource, man to man. " Advance, 
Australia!" is the Australian motto; and the Aus- 
tralians advanced. 



AUSTRALIANS AND A WINDMILL 211 

The New Zealanders had their part elsewhere 
and played it in the New Zealand way. 

" They have never failed to take an objective set 
them," said a general after the taking of Flers, 
" and they have always gained their positions with 
slight losses." 

Could there be higher praise? Success and 
thrift, courage and skill in taking cover! For the 
business of a soldier is to do his enemy the maximum 
of damage with the minimum to himself, as anyone 
may go on repeating. Probably the remark of the 
New Zealanders in answer to the commander's 
praise would be, "Thank you. Why not?" as if 
this were what the New Zealanders expected of 
themselves. They take much for granted about 
New Zealand, without being boastful. 

" A blooming quiet lot that keeps to themselves," 
said a British soldier, " but likable when you get to 
know them." 

You might depend upon the average New Zealand 
private for an interesting talk about social organiza- 
tion, municipal improvements, and human welfare 
under government direction. The standard of indi- 
vidual intelligence and education was high and it 
seemed to make good fighting men. 

The Australians had had to grub their way foot 
by foot, and the South Africans on July 15th with 
veldt gallantry had swept into Delville Wood, which 



212 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

was to be a shambles for two months, and stood off 
with a thin line the immense forces of hastily gath- 
ered reserves which the Germans threw at this vital 
point which had been lost in a surprise attack. 

All this on the way up to the Ridge. The New 
Zealanders were to play a part in the same move- 
ment as the Canadians after the Ridge was taken. 
They were in the big sweep down from the Ridge 
over a broad front. Across the open for about 
two miles they had tO-.go, fair targets for shell fire ; 
and they went, keeping their order as if on parade, 
working out each evolution with soldierly precision 
including cooperation with the " tanks." They were 
at their final objective on schedule time, accomplish- 
ing the task with amazingly few casualties and so 
little fuss that it seemed a kind of skilful field-day 
manoeuver. All that they took they held and still 
held it when the mists of autumn obscured artil- 
lery observation and they were relieved from the 
quagmire for their turn of rest. 



XVII 

THE HATEFUL RIDGE 

Grinding of courage of three powerful races — A ridge that will be 
famous — Germans on the defensive — Efforts to maintain their 
morale — Gas shells — Summer heat, dust and fatigue — Prussian 
hatred of the British — Dead bodies strapped to guns — Guille- 
mont a granulation of bricks and mortar and earth — " We've 
only to keep at them, sir " — Stalking machine guns — Machine 
guns in craters — British cheerfulness — The war will be over 
when it is won — Soldiers talk shop — An incident of brutal 
militarism — Simple rules for surviving shell fire — A " happy 
home " with a shell arriving every minute — Business-like 
monotony of the battle — Insignificance of one man among mil- 
lions — A victory of position, of will, of morale! 

Sometimes it occurred to one to consider what his- 
tory might say about the Ridge and also to wonder 
how much history, which pretends to know all, 
would really know. Thus, one sought perspective 
of the colossal significance of the uninterrupted bat- 
tle whose processes numbed the mind and to distin- 
guish the meaning of different stages of the struggle. 
Nothing had so well reflected the character of the 
war or of its protagonists, French, British and Ger- 
man, as this grinding of resources, of courage, and 
of will of three powerful races. 

We are always talking of phases as the result of 
natural human speculation and tendency to set events 

213 



2i 4 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

in groups. Observers also may gratify this inclina- 
tion as well as the contemporaneous military expert 
writing from his maps. It is historically accepted, 
I think, that the first decisive phase was the battle 
of the Marne when Paris was saved. The second 
was Verdun, when the Germans again sought a deci- 
sion on the Western front by an offensive of sledge- 
hammer blows against frontal positions; and, per- 
haps, the third came when on the Ridge the British 
and the French kept up their grim, insistent, piece- 
meal attacks, holding the enemy week in and week 
out on the defensive, aiming at mastery as the scales 
trembled in the new turn of the balance and initia- 
tive passed from one side to the other in the begin- 
ning of that new era. 

This scarred slope with its gentle ascent, this sec- 
tion of farming land with its woods growing more 
ragged every day from shell fire, with its daily and 
nightly thunders, its trickling procession of wounded 
and prisoners down the communication trenches 
speaking the last word in human bravery, industry, 
determination and endurance — this might one day 
be not only the monument to the positions of all the 
battalions that had fought, its copses, its villages, 
its knolls famous to future generations as is Little 
Round Top with us, but in its monstrous realism 
be an immortal expression, unrealized by those who 
fought, of a commander's iron will and foresight 



THE HATEFUL RIDGE 215 

in gaining that supremacy in arms, men and ma- 
terial which was the genesis of the great deci- 
sion. 1 

The German had not yielded his offensive at 
Verdun after the attack of July 1st. At least, he 
still showed the face of initiative there while he 
rested content that at the same time he could main- 
tain his front intact on the Somme. The succeed- 
ing attack of July 15th broke his confidence with 
its suggestion that the confusion in his lines would 
be too dangerous if it happened over a broader 
front for him to consider anything but the defen- 
sive. Thus, the Allied offensive had broken his 
offensive. 

Now he began drawing away his divisions from 
the Verdun sector, bringing guns to answer the 
British and French fire and men whose prodigal use 
alone could enforce his determination to maintain 
morale and prevent any further bold strokes such 
as that of July 15th. 

His sausage balloons began to reappear in the 
sky as the summer wore on; he increased the num- 
ber of his aeroplanes; more of his five-point-nine 
howitzers were sending their compliments; he 
stretched out his shell fire over communication 
trenches and strong points; mustered great quanti- 
ties of lachrymatory shells and for the first time 
used gas shells with a generosity which spoke his 



2i6 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

faith in their efficacy. The lachrymatory shell 
makes your eyes smart, and the Germans appar- 
ently considered this a great auxiliary to high explo- 
sives and shrapnel. Was it because of the success 
of the first gas attack at Ypres that they now placed 
such reliance in gas shells? The shell when it lands 
seems a " dud," which is a shell that has failed to 
explode; then it blows out a volume of gas. 

" If one hit right under your nose," said a soldier, 
" and you hadn't your gas mask on, it might kill you. 
But when you see one fall you don't run to get a 
sniff in order to accommodate the Boche by asphyxi- 
ating yourself." 

Another soldier suggested that the Germans had 
a big supply on hand and were working off the stock 
for want of other kinds. The British who by this 
time were settled in the offensive joked about the 
deluge of gas shells with a gallant, amazing humor. 
Going up to the Ridge was going to their regular 
duty. They did not shirk it or hail it with delight. 
They simply went, that was all, when it was a 
battalion's turn to go. 

July heat became August heat as the grinding pro- 
ceeded. The gunners worked in their shirts or 
stripped to the waist. Sweat streaks mapped the 
faces of the men who came out of the trenches. 
Stifling clouds of dust hung over the roads, with the 
trucks phantom-like as they emerged from the gritty 



THE HATEFUL RIDGE 217 

mist and their drivers' eyes peered out of masks of 
gray which clung to their faces. A fall of rain 
came as a blessing to Briton and German alike. 
German prisoners worn with exhaustion had com- 
plexions the tint of their uniforms. If the British 
seemed weary sometimes, one had only to see the 
prisoners to realize that the defensive was suffering 
more than the offensive. The fatigue of some of 
the men was of the kind that one week's sleep or a 
month's rest will not cure; something fixed in their 
beings. 

It was a new kind of fighting for the Germans. 
They smarted under it, they who had been used 
to the upper hand. In the early stages of the 
war their artillery had covered their well-ordered 
charges; they had been killing the enemy with gun- 
fire. Now the Allies were returning the compliment ; 
the shoe was on the other foot. A striking change, 
indeed, from " On to Paris! " the old battle-cry of 
leaders who had now come to urge these men to the 
utmost of endurance and sacrifice by telling them 
that if they did not hold against the relentless ham- 
mering of British and French guns what had been 
done to French villages would be done to their 
own. 

Prisoners spoke of peace as having been prom- 
ised as close at hand by their officers. In July 
the date had been set as Sept. 1st. Later, it 



218 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

was set as Nov. ist. The German was as a swim- 
mer trying to reach shore, in this case peace, with 
the assurance of those who urged him on that a few 
more strokes would bring him there. Thus have 
armies been urged on for years. 

Those fighting did not have, as had the prisoners, 
their eyes opened to the vast preparations behind the 
British lines to carry on the offensive. Mostly the 
prisoners were amiable, peculiarly unlike the proud 
men taken in the early days of the war when confi- 
dence in their " system " as infallible was at its 
height. Yet there were exceptions. I saw an officer 
marching at the head of the survivors of his battal- 
ion along the road from Montauban one day with 
his head up, a cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth 
at an aggressive angle, his unshaven chin and dusty 

clothes heightening his attitude of " You go to , 

you English! " 

The hatred of the British was a strengthening 
factor in the defense. Should they, the Prussians, 
be beaten by New Army men? No! Die first! 
said Prussian officers. The German staff might be 
as good as ever, but among the mixed troops — the 
old and the young, the hollow-chested and the 
square-shouldered, mouth-breathers with spectacles 
and bent fathers of families, vigorous boys in their 
late 'teens with the down still on their cheeks and 
hardened veterans survivors of many battles east and 



THE HATEFUL RIDGE 219 

west — they were reverting appreciably to natural 
human tendencies despite the iron discipline. 

It was Skobeloff, if I recollect rightly, who said 
that out of every hundred men twenty were natural 
fighters, sixty were average men who would fight 
under impulse or when well led, and twenty were 
timid; and armies were organized on the basis of 
the sixty average to make them into a whole of even 
efficiency in action. The German staff had supplied 
supreme finesse to this end. They had an army 
that was a machine; yet its units were flesh and 
blood and the pounding of shell fire and the dogged 
fighting on the Ridge must have an effect. 

It became apparent through those two months of 
piecemeal advance that the sixty average men were 
not as good as they had been. The twenty " funk- 
sticks," in army phrase, were given to yielding 
themselves if they were without an officer, but the 
twenty natural fighters — well, human psychology 
does not change. They were the type that made 
the professional armies of other days, the brigands, 
too, and also those of every class of society to whom 
patriotic duty had become an exaltation approach- 
ing fanaticism. More fighting made them fight 
harder. 

Such became members of the machine gun corps, 
which took an oath never to surrender, and led 
bombing parties and posted themselves in shell- 



220 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

craters to face the charges while shells fell thick 
around them, or remained up in the trench taking 
their chances against curtains of fire that covered 
an infantry charge, in the hope of being able to turn 
on their own bullet spray for a moment before 
being killed. Sometimes their dead bodies were 
found strapped to their guns, more often probably 
by their own request, as an insurance against desert- 
ing their posts, than by command. 

Shell fire was the theatricalism of the struggle, 
the roar of guns its thunder; but night or day the 
sound of the staccato of that little arch devil of kill- 
ing, the machine gun, coming from the Ridge seemed 
as true an expression of what was always going on 
there as a rattlesnake's rattle is of its character. Del- 
ville and High Woods and Guillemont and Longue- 
val and the Switch Trench — these are symbolic 
names of that attrition, of the heroism of British 
persistence which would not take No for answer. 

You might think that you had seen ruins until 
you saw those of Guillemont after it was taken. 
They were the granulation of bricks and mortar and 
earth mixed by the blasts of shell fire which crushed 
solids into dust and splintered splinters. Guille- 
mont lay beyond Trones Wood across an open space 
where the German guns had full play. There was 
a stone quarry on the outskirts, and a quarry no less 
than a farm like Waterlot, which was to the north- 



THE HATEFUL RIDGE 221 

ward, and Falfemont, to the southward and flank- 
ing the village, formed shelter. It was not much 
of a quarry, but it was a hole which would be 
refuge for reserves and machine guns. The two 
farms, clear targets for British guns, had their deep 
dugouts whose roofs were reinforced by the ruins 
that fell upon them against penetration even by 
shells of large caliber. How the Germans fought 
to keep Falfemont! Once they sent out a charge 
with the bayonet to meet a British charge between 
walls of shell fire and there through the mist the 
steel was seen flashing and vague figures wrestling. 

Guillemont and the farms won and Ginchy 
which lay beyond won and the British had their 
flank on high ground. Twice they were in Guille- 
mont but could not remain, though as usual they 
kept some of their gains. It was a battle from 
dugout to dugout, from shelter to shelter of any 
kind burrowed in debris or in fields, with the British 
never ceasing here or elsewhere to continue their 
pressure. And the debris of a village had particular 
appeal; it yielded to the spade; its piles gave natural 
cover. 

A British soldier returning from one of the 
attacks as he hobbled through Trones Wood ex- 
pressed to me the essential generalship of the bat- 
tle. He was outwardly as unemotional as if he 
were coming home from his day's work, respectful 



222 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

and good-humored, though he had a hole in both 
arms from machine gun fire, a shrapnel wound in 
the heel, and seemed a trifle resentful of the added 
tribute of another shrapnel wound in his shoulder 
after he had left the firing-line and was on his way 
to the casualty clearing station. Insisting that he 
could lift the cigarette I offered him to his lips and 
light it, too, he said: 

" We've only to keep at them, sir. They'll go." 
So the British kept at them and so did the 
French at every point. Was Delville Wood worse 
than High Wood? This is too nice a distinction in 
torments to be drawn. Possess either of them com- 
pletely and command of the Ridge in that section 
was won. The edge of a wood on the side away 
from your enemy was the easiest part to hold. It 
is difficult to range artillery on it because of re- 
stricted vision, and the enemy's shells aimed at it 
strike the trees and burst prematurely among his 
own men. Other easy, relatively easy, places to 
hold are the dead spaces of gullies and ravines. 
There you were out of fire and there you were not; 
there you could hold and there you could not. 
Machine gun fire and shell fire were the arbiters of 
topography more dependable than maps. 

Why all the trees were not cut down by the con- 
tinual bombardments of both sides was past under- 
standing. There was one lone tree on the skyline 



THE HATEFUL RIDGE 223 

near Longueval which I had watched for weeks. It 
still had a limb, yes, the luxury of a limb, the last 
time that I saw it, pointing with a kind of defiance 
in its immunity. Of course it had been struck many 
times. Bits of steel were imbedded in its trunk; 
but only a direct hit on the trunk will bring down 
a tree. Trees may be slashed and whittled and 
nicked and gashed and still stand; and when vil- 
lages have been pulverized except for the timbering 
of the houses, a scarred shade tree will remain. 

Thus, trees in Delville Wood survived, naked 
sticks among fallen and splintered trunks and up- 
turned roots. How any man could have survived 
was the puzzling thing. None could if he had 
remained there continuously and exposed himself; 
but man is the most cunning of animals. With gas 
mask and eye-protectors ready, steel helmet on his 
head and his faithful spade to make himself a new 
hole whenever he moved, he managed the incredible 
in self-protection. Earth piled back of a tree-trunk 
would stop bullets and protect his body from 
shrapnel. There he lay and there a German lay 
opposite him, except when attacks were being made. 

Not getting the northern edge of the woods the 
British began sapping out in trenches to the east 
toward Ginchy, where the map contours showed 
the highest ground in that neighborhood. New 
lines of trenches kept appearing on the map, often 



224 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

with group names such as Coffee Alley, Tea Lane 
and Beer Street, perhaps. Out in the open along 
the irregular plateau the shells were no more kindly, 
the bombing and the sapping no less diligent all 
the way to the windmill, where the Australians 
were playing the same kind of a game. With the 
actual summit gained at certain points, these had 
to be held pending the taking of the whole, or of 
enough to permit a wave of men to move forward 
in a general attack without its line being broken by 
the resistance of strong points, which meant con- 
fusion. 

Before any charge the machine guns must be 
" killed." No initiative of pioneer or Indian scout 
surpassed that exhibited in conquering machine gun 
positions. When a big game hunter tells you about 
having stalked tigers, ask him if he has ever stalked 
a machine gun to its lair. 

As for the nature of the lair, here is one where 
a Briton " dug himself in " to be ready to repulse 
any counter-attack to recover ground that the Brit- 
ish had just won. Some layers of sandbags are 
sunk level with the earth with an excavation back 
of them large enough for a machine gun standard 
and to give the barrel swing and for the gunner, 
who back of this had dug himself a well four or five 
feet deep of sufficient diameter to enable him to hud- 
dle at the bottom in " stormy weather." He was 



THE HATEFUL RIDGE 225 

general and army, too, of his little establishment. 
In the midst of shells and trench mortars, with bul- 
lets whizzing around his head, he had to keep a 
cool aim and make every pellet which he poured 
out of his gun muzzle count against the wave of 
men coming toward him who were at his mercy if 
he could remain alive for a few minutes and keep 
his head. 

He must not reveal his position before his oppor- 
tunity came. All around where this Briton had held 
the fort there were shell-craters like the dots of 
close shooting around a bull's-eye ; no tell-tale blood 
spots this time, but a pile of two or three hundred 
cartridge cases lying where they had fallen as they 
were emptied of their cones of lead. Luck was 
with the occupant, but not with another man play- 
ing the same game not far away. Broken bits of 
gun and fragments of cloth mixed with earth ex- 
plained the fate of a German machine gunner who 
had emplaced his piece in the same manner. 

Before a charge, crawl up at night from shell- 
crater to shell-crater and locate the enemy's machine 
guns. Then, if your own guns and the trench mor- 
tars do not get them, go stalking with supplies of 
bombs and remember to throw yours before the 
machine gunner, who also has a stock for such 
emergencies, throws his. When a machine gun 
begins rattling into a company front in a charge the 



226 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

men drop for cover, while officers consider how to 
draw the devil's tusks. Arnold von Winkelried, 
who gathered the spears to his breast to make a 
path for his comrades, won his glory because the 
fighting forces were small in his day. But with such 
enormous forces as are now engaged and with 
heroism so common, we make only an incident of 
the officer who went out to silence a machine gun 
and was found lying dead across the gun with the 
gunner dead beside him. 

Those whose business it was to observe, the six 
correspondents, Robinson, Thomas, Gibbs, Philips, 
Russell and myself, went and came always with a 
sense of incapacity and sometimes with a feeling that 
writing was a worthless business when others were 
fighting. The line of advance on the big map at 
our quarters extended as the brief army reports 
were read into the squares every morning by the 
key of figures and numerals with a detail that in- 
cluded every little trench, every copse, every land- 
mark, and then we chose where we would go that 
day. At corps headquarters there were maps with 
still more details and officers would explain the 
previous day's work to us. Every wood and vil- 
lage, every viewpoint, we knew, and every casualty 
clearing station and prisoners' inclosure. At bat- 
talion camps within sight of the Ridge and within 
range of the guns, where their blankets helped 



THE HATEFUL RIDGE 227 

to make shelter from the sun, you might talk 
with the men out of the fight and lunch and chat 
with the officers who awaited the word to go in 
again or perhaps to hear that their tour was over 
and they could go to rest in Ypres sector, which had 
become relatively quiet. 

They had their letters and packages from home 
before they slept and had written letters in return 
after waking; and there was nothing to do now 
except to relax and breathe, to renew the vitality 
that had been expended in the fierce work where 
shells were still threshing the earth, which rose in 
clouds of dust to settle back again in enduring pas- 
sive resistance. 

There was much talk early in the war about Brit- 
ish cheerfulness; so much that officers and men 
began to resent it as expressing the idea that they 
took such a war as this as a kind of holiday, when 
it was the last thing outside of Hades that any sane 
man would choose. It was a question in my own 
mind at times if Hades would not have been a 
pleasant change. Yet the characterization is true, 
peculiarly true, even in the midst of the fighting on 
the Ridge. Cheerfulness takes the place of emo- 
tionalism as the armor against hardship and death; 
a good-humored balance between exhilaration and 
depression which meets smile with smile and creates 
an atmosphere superior to all vicissitudes. Why 



228 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

should we be downhearted? Why, indeed, when it 
does no good. Not " Merrie England! " War is 
not a merry business; but an Englishman may be 
cheerful for the sake of self and comrades. 

Of course, these battalions, officers and men, 
would talk about when the war would be over. 
Even the Esquimaux must have an opinion on the 
subject by this time. That of the men who make 
the war, whose lives are the lives risked, was worth 
more, perhaps, than that of people living thousands 
of miles away; for it is they who are doing the 
fighting, who will stop fighting. To them it would 
be over when it was won. The time this would 
require varied with different men — one year, two 
years; and again they would turn satirical and argue 
whether the sixth or the seventh year would be the 
worst. And they talked shop about the latest 
wrinkles in fighting; how best to avoid having men 
buried by shell-bursts; the value of gas and lach- 
rymatory shells; the ratio of high explosives to 
shrapnel; methods of "cleaning out" dugouts or 
" doing in " machine guns, all in a routine that had 
become an accepted part of life like the details of 
the stock carried and methods of selling in a depart- 
ment store. 

Indelible the memories of these talks, which often 
brought out illustrations of racial temperament. 
One company was more horrified over having found 



THE HATEFUL RIDGE 229 

a German tied to a trench parados to be killed by 
British shell fire as a field punishment than by the 
horrors of other men equally mashed and torn, or 
at having crawled over the moist bodies of the 
dead, or slept among them, or been covered with 
spatters of blood and flesh — for that incident struck 
home with a sense of brutal militarism which was 
the thing in their minds against which they were 
fighting. 

With steel helmets on and gas masks over our 
shoulders, we would leave our car at the dead line 
and set off to " see something," when now the fight- 
ing was all hidden in the folds of the ground, or in 
the woods, or lost on the horizon where the front 
line of either of these two great armies, with their 
immense concentration of men and material and 
roads gorged with transport and thousands of belch- 
ing guns, was held by a few men with machine guns 
in shell-craters, their positions sometimes inter- 
woven. Old hands in the Somme battle become 
shell-wise. They are the ones whom the French 
call " varnished," which is a way of saying that 
projectiles glance off their anatomy. They keep 
away from points where the enemy will direct his 
fire as a matter of habit or scientific gunnery, and 
always recollect that the German has not enough 
shells to sow them broadcast over the whole battle 
area. 



2 3 o MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

It is not an uncommon thing for one to feel quite 
safe within a couple of hundred yards of an artillery 
concentration. That corner of a village, that edge 
of a shattered grove, that turn in the highway, that 
sunken road — keep away from them! Any kind 
of trench for shrapnel; lie down flat unless a satis- 
factory dugout is near for protection from high 
explosives which burst in the earth. If you are at 
the front and a curtain of fire is put behind you, 
wait until it is over or go around it. If there is one 
ahead, wait until another day — provided that you 
are a spectator. Always bear in mind how unim- 
portant you are, how small a figure on the great 
field, and that if every shell fired had killed one 
soldier there would not be an able-bodied man in 
uniform left alive on the continent of Europe. By 
observing these simple rules you may see a surpris- 
ing amount with a chance of surviving. 

One day I wanted to go into the old German dug- 
outs under a formless pile of ruins which a British 
colonel had made his battalion headquarters; but I 
did not want to go enough to persist when I under- 
stood the situation. Formerly, my idea of a good 
dugout — and I always like to be within striking dis- 
tance of one — Was a cave twenty feet deep with a 
roof of four or five layers of granite, rubble and 
timber; but now I feel more safe if the fragments 
of a town hall are piled on top of this. 



THE HATEFUL RIDGE 231 

The Germans were putting a shell every minute 
with clockwork regularity into the colonel's " happy 
home " and at intervals four shells in a salvo. You 
had to make a run for it between the shells, and if 
you did not know the exact location of the dugout 
you might have been hunting for it some time. 
Runners bearing messages took their chances both 
going and coming and two men were hit. The 
colonel was quite safe twenty feet underground 
with the matting of debris including that of a fallen 
chimney overhead, but he was a most unpopular 
host. The next day he moved his headquarters and 
not having been considerate enough to inform the 
Germans of the fact they kept on methodically 
pounding the roof of the untenanted premises. 

After every battlefield " promenade " I was glad 
to step into the car waiting at the " dead line," 
where the chauffeurs frequently had had harder luck 
in being shelled than we had farther forward. Yet 
I know of no worse place to be in than a car when 
you hear the first growing scream which indicates 
that yours is the neighborhood selected by a Ger- 
man battery or two for expending some of its 
ammunition. When you are in danger you like to 
be on your feet and to possess every one of your 
faculties. I used to put cotton in my ears when I 
walked through the area of the gun positions as 
some protection to the eardrums from the blasts, 



2 3 2 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

but always took it out once I was beyond the big 
calibers, as an acute hearing after some experience 
gave you instant warning of any " krump " or five- 
point-nine coming in your direction, advising you 
which way to dodge and also saving you from un- 
necessarily running for a dugout if the shell were 
passing well overhead or short. 

I was glad, too, when the car left the field quite 
behind and was over the hills in peaceful country. 
But one never knew. Fifteen miles from the front 
line was not always safe. Once when a sudden out- 
burst of fifteen-inch naval shells sent the people of 
a town to cover and scattered fragments over the 
square, one cut open the back of the chauffeur's 
head just as we were getting into our car. 

"Are you going out to be strafed at?" became 
an inquiry in the mess on the order of " Are you 
going to take an afternoon off for golf to-day?" 
The only time I felt that I could claim any advan- 
tage in phlegm over my comrades was when I slept 
through two hours of aerial bombing with anti- 
aircraft guns busy in the neighborhood, which, as I 
explained, was no more remarkable than sleeping 
in a hotel at home with flat-wheeled surface cars 
and motor horns screeching under your window. A 
subway employee or a traffic policeman in New 
York ought never to suffer from shell-shock if he 
goes to war. 



THE HATEFUL RIDGE 233 

The account of personal risk which in other wars 
might make a magazine article or a book chapter, 
once you sat down to write it, melted away as your 
ego was reduced to its proper place in cosmos. 
Individuals had never been so obscurely atomic. 
With hundreds of thousands fighting, personal ex- 
perience was valuable only as it expressed that of 
the whole. Each story brought back to the mess 
was much like others, thrilling for the narrator and 
repetition for the polite listener, except it was some 
officer fresh from the communication trench who 
brought news of what was going on in that day's 
work. 

Thus, the battle had become static; its incidents 
of a kind like the product of some mighty mill. The 
public, falsely expecting that the line would be 
broken, wanted symbols of victory in fronts chang- 
ing on the map and began to weary of the accounts. 
It was the late Charles A. Dana who is credited 
with saying: " If a dog bites a man it is not news, 
but if a man bites a dog it is." 

Let the men attack with hatchets and in evening 
dress and this would win all the headlines in the 
land because people at their breakfast tables would 
say: "Here is something new in the war! " Men 
killing men was not news, but a battalion of trained 
bloodhounds sent out to bite the Germans would 
have been. I used to try to hunt down some of the 



234 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

" novelties " which received the favor of publica- 
tion, but though they were well known abroad the 
man in the trenches had heard nothing about them. 

Bullets, shells, bayonets and bombs remained the 
tried and practical methods there on the Ridge with 
its overpowering drama, any act of which almost 
any day was greater than Spionkop or Magers- 
fontein which thrilled a world that was not then 
war-stale; and ever its supreme feature was that 
determination which was like a kind of fate in its 
progress of chipping, chipping at a stone founda- 
tion that must yield. 

The Ridge seeped in one's very existence. You 
could see it as clearly in imagination as in reality, 
with its horizon under shell-bursts and the slope 
with its maze of burrows and its battered trenches. 
Into those calm army reports association could read 
many indications: the telling fact that the German 
losses in being pressed off the Ridge were as great 
if not greater than the British, their sufferings 
worse under a heavier deluge of shell fire, the in- 
creased skill of the offensive and the failure of Ger- 
man counter-attacks after each advance. 

No one doubted that the Ridge would be taken 
and taken it was, or all of it that was needed for 
the drive that was to clean up any outstanding 
points, with its sweep down into the valley. A vic- 
tory this, not to be measured by territory; for in 



THE HATEFUL RIDGE 235 

one day's rush more ground was gained than in two 
months of siege. A victory of position, of will, of 
morale! Sharpening its steel and wits on enemy 
steel and wits in every kind of fighting, the New 
Army had proved itself in the supreme te§t of all 
qualities. 



XVIII 

A TRULY FRENCH AFFAIR 

A French lieutenant arm-in-arm with two privates — A luncheon 
at the front — French regimental officers — Three and four 
stripes on the sleeves for the number of wounds — Over the 
parapet twenty-three times — Comradeship of soldiers — Mon- 
sieur Elan again — Baby soixattte-quinze — An incident truly 
French. 

This was another French day, an ultra French 
day, with Monsieur Elan playfully inciting human 
nature to make holiday in the sight of bursting 
shells. There had been many other luncheons with 
generals and staffs in their chateaux which were 
delightful and illuminating occasions, but this had 
a distinction of its own not only in its companion- 
ship but in its surroundings. 

Mon lieutenant who invited me warned me to eat 
a light breakfast in order to leave room for ade- 
quate material appreciation of the hospitality of his 
own battalion, in which he had fought in the ranks 
earning promotion and his croix de guerre in a way 
that was more gratifying to him than the possession 
of a fortune, chateaux and high-powered cars. I 
have seen him in the streets of our town u hiking " 
along with the French marching step arm-in-arm with 

236 



A TRULY FRENCH AFFAIR 237 

two French privates, though he was an officer. He 
introduced them as from "my battalion! " with as 
much pride as if they were Generals Joffre and 
Castelnau. 

What a setting for a " swell repast," as he 
jokingly called it! A table made of boxes with 
boxes for seats and plates of tin, under apple trees 
looking down into a valley where the transport and 
blue-clad regiments were winding their way past the 
eddies of men of the battalion in a rest camp, with 
the soixante-quinze firing from the slopes beyond 
at intervals and a German battery trying to reach 
a British sausage balloon hanging lazily in the still 
air against the blue sky and never getting it. A 
flurry of figures after some " krumps " had burst at 
another point meant that some men had been killed 
and wounded. 

As the colonel and the second in command were 
not present there was no restraint of seniority on 
the festivity, though I think that seniority knowing 
what was going on might have felt lonely in its isola- 
tion. We had many courses, soup, fish, entree and 
roast, salad and cheese which was cheese in a land 
where they eat cheese, and luscious grapes and 
pears; everything that the market afforded served 
in sight of the front line. Why not? France thinks 
that nothing is too good for her fighters. If ever 
man ought to have the best it is when to-morrow 



23a MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

He returns to the firing-line and hard rations — when 
to-morrow he may die for France. 

The senior captain presided. He was a man of 
other wars, burned by the suns of Morocco, with a 
military moustache that gave effect to his spirited 
manner. When my friend, the lieutenant, joined 
the regiment as a private he was smooth-shaven and 
his colonel asked him whether he was a priest or a 
bookmaker, or meant to be a soldier. Next morn- 
ing he allowed nature to have her way on his upper 
lip, the colonel's hint being law in all things to 
those who served under him. 

Every officer had his croix de guerre in this 
colonial battalion with its ranks open to all comers 
of all degrees and promotion for those who could 
earn it in face of the machine guns where the New 
Army privates were earning theirs. One officer 
with the chest of Hercules, who looked equal to the 
fiercest Prussian or the tallest Pomeranian and at 
least one additional small Teuton for good measure, 
mentioned that he had been in Peking. I asked him 
if he knew some officer friends of mine who had 
been there at the same time. He replied that he 
had been a private then, and he liked the American 
Y. M. C. A. 

His breast was a panoply of medals. Among 
them was the Legion of Honor, while his croix de 
guerre had all the stars, bronze, silver and gold, and 



A TRULY FRENCH AFFAIR 239 

two palms, as I remember, which meant that twice 
some deed of his out in the inferno had won official 
mention for him all the way up from the battalion 
through brigade, division and corps to the supreme 
command. The American Y. M. C. A. in Peking 
ought to be proud of his good opinion. 

The architect, tall, well built, smiling and fair- 
haired, with an intellectual face, sat opposite the 
little dealer in precious stones who had traveled 
the world around in his occupation. There was an 
artist, too, who held an argument with the architect 
on art which mon capitaine considered meretricious 
and hair-splitting, his conviction being that they were 
only airing a wordy pretentiousness and really knew 
little more of what they were talking about than 
he. In politics we had a Republican, a Socialist and 
a Royalist, who also were babbling without captur- 
ing any dugouts, according to mon capitaine who was 
simply a soldier. It was clear that the Socialist and 
the Royalist were both popular, as well as my 
friend, though he had been promoted to the staff. 

Another present was the " Admiral," a naval 
officer, commanding the monstrous guns of twelve 
to seventeen inches mounted on railway trucks, who 
wrote sonnets between directing two-thousand-pound 
projectiles on their errands of mashing German dug- 
outs. He did not like gunnery where he did not see 
his target naval fashion, but he had done so well 



2 4 o MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

that he was kept at it. His latest sonnet was to an 
abstract girl somewhere in France which the So- 
cialist, who was a man of critical judgment in every- 
thing and of a rollicking disposition, praised very 
highly and read aloud with the elocution of a 
Coquelin. 

While others had as many as three and four gold 
stripes on their sleeves to indicate the number of 
their wounds, the Socialist had been over the para- 
pet twenty-three times in charges without being hit, 
which he took as a sure sign that his was the right 
kind of politics, the Royalist and the Republican 
disagreeing and mon capitaine saying that politics 
were a mere matter of taste and being wounded a 
matter of luck. Thereupon, the Socialist undertook 
a brief oration rich with humor, relieving it of too 
much of the seriousness of the tribune in the Cham- 
ber of Deputies, where he will probably thunder out 
his periods one of these days if he contrives to keep 
on going over the parapet without being hit. 

A man was what he was as a man and nothing 
more in that distinguished company which had 
gained its distinction by extinguishing Germans. 
Comradeship made all differences of opinion, birth 
and wealth only the excuse for banter in this varia- 
tion of type from the tall architect with his charm- 
ing manner to the matter-of-fact expert in dia- 
monds and opals, from the big private of colonial 



A TRULY FRENCH AFFAIR 241 

regulars who had won his shoulder straps to the 
fellow with the blue blood of aristocratic France in 
his veins. The architect I particularly remember, 
for he was killed in the next charge, and the dealer 
in precious stones, for a shell-burst in the face would 
never allow his eyes to see the flash of a diamond 
again. 

But let youth eat, drink and be merry in the 
shadow of the fortunes of war which might claim 
some of them to-morrow, making vacancies for 
promotion of privates down in the camp. Where 
Cheeriness was the handmaiden of morale with the 
British, Monsieur Elan was with the French. 
Everybody talked not only with his lips but with 
his hands and shoulders, in that absence of self- 
consciousness which gives grace to free expression. 
They spoke of their homes at one juncture with a 
sober and lingering desire and a catch in the throat 
and they touched on the problems after the war, 
which they would win or fight on forever, concluding 
that the men from the trenches who would have the 
say would make a new and better France and sweep 
aside any interference with the march of their num- 
bers and patriotism. 

We ate until capacity was reached and loitered 
over the black coffee, with the private who had pro- 
duced all the courses out of the dugout with the 
magic of the rabbit out of a hat sharing in the con- 



242 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

versation at times without breaking the bonds of 
discipline. Finally, the cook was brought forth, too, 
to receive his meed of praise as the real magician. 
Then we went to pay our respects to the colonel 
and the second in command. A sturdy little man 
the colonel, a regular from his neat fatigue cap to 
the soles of his polished boots, but with a human 
twinkle through his eyeglasses reflecting much wis- 
dom in the handling of men of all kinds, which, no 
doubt, was why he was in command of this battalion. 

Afterward, we visited the men lounging in their 
quarters or forming a smiling group, each one ready 
with quick responses when spoken to, men of all 
kinds from Apaches of Paris to the sons of princes, 
perhaps, while the Washington Post March was 
played for the American. Later, across the road 
we saw the then new baby soixante-quinze guns for 
trench work, which were being wheeled about with 
a merry appreciation of the fact that a battery of 
father soixante-quinze was passing by at the time. 

Finally, came an incident truly French and delight- 
ful in its boyishness, as mon capitaine hinted that I 
should ask mon colonel if he would permit mon 
capitaine to go into town and have dinner with my 
friend and the admiral and myself, returning in my 
friend's car in time to proceed to the firing-line with 
the battalion to-morrow. Accordingly I spoke to 
the colonel and the twinkle of his eye as he gave 



A TRULY FRENCH AFFAIR 243 

consent indicated, perhaps, that he knew who had 
put me up to it. Mon capitaine had his dinner and 
a good one, too, and was back at dawn ready for 
battle. 

It is not that France has changed; only that some 
people who ought to have known better have 
changed their opinions formed about her after '70 
when, in the company of other foreigners, they 
went to see the sights of Paris. 



XIX 

ON THE AERIAL FERRY 

The " Ferry-Pilot's " office — Everybody is young in the Royal Flying 
Corps — Any kind of aeroplane to choose from — A flying ma- 
chine new from the factory — " A good old 'bus " — Twenty 
planes a day from England to France — England seen from the 
clouds — An aerial guide-post — -Stopping places — The channel 
from 4,000 feet aloft — Out of sight in the clouds midway be- 
tween England and France — Tobogganing from the clouds — 
France from the air- — A good flight. 

Personal experience now intrudes in answer to the 
question whence come all the aeroplanes that take 
the place of those lost or worn out, which was 
made clear when I was in London for a few days' 
change from the fighting on the Ridge through a 
request to a general at the War Office for permis- 
sion to fly back to the front. 

" Why not? " he said. " When are you going? " 

" Monday." 

He called up another general on the telephone 
and in a few words the arrangements were 
made. 

"And my baggage?" I suggested. 

"How much of it?" 

" A suit case." 

" The machine ought to manage that considering 

244 



ON THE AERIAL FERRY 245 

that it carries one hundred and fifty pounds in 
bombs." 

On Monday morning at the appointed hour I was 
walking past a soldierly line of planes flanking an 
aerodrome field scattered with others that had just 
alighted or were about to rise and inquiring my 
way to the " Ferry-Pilot's " office. I found it, identi- 
fied by a white-lettered sign on a blackboard, down 
the main street of temporary buildings occupied by 
the aviators as quarters. 

"' Yes, all right," said the young officer sitting at 
the desk, " but we are making no crossings this 
morning. There is a storm over the channel." 

Weather forecasts, which had long ago disap- 
peared from the English newspapers lest they give 
information to Zeppelins, had become the privilege 
of those who travel by air or repulsed aerial raids. 

"It may clear up this afternoon," he added. 
" Why not go up to the mess and make yourself 
comfortable, and return about three ? Perhaps you 
may go then." 

At three I was back in his office, where five or 
six young aviators were waiting for their orders as 
jockeys might wait their turn to take out horses. 
Everybody is young in the Royal Flying Corps and 
everybody thinks and talks in the terms of youth. 

' You can push off at once! " said the officer at 
the desk. 



246 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

Of course I must have a pass, which was a dupli- 
cate in mimeograph with my name as passenger in 
place of "machine gunner;" or, to put it another 
way, I was one joy-rider who must be officially 
delivered from an aerodrome in England to an 
aerodrome in France. Youth laughed when I took 
that view. Had I ever flown before? Oh, yes, a 
fact that put the situation still more at ease. 

"What kind of a 'bus would you like?" asked 
the master pilot. " We have all kinds going over 
to-day. Take your choice." 

I went out into the field to choose my steed and 
decided upon a big " pusher," where both aviator 
and passenger sit forward with the propeller and 
the roar of the motor behind them. She had been 
flown down across England from the factory the 
day before and, tried out, was ready for the chan- 
nel passage. 

" You'll take her over," said the master pilot to 
one of the group waiting their turn. 

Then it occurred to somebody that another 
official detail had been overlooked, and I had to 
give my name and address and next of kin to com- 
plete formalities which should impress novices, 
while youth looked on smilingly at forty-three which 
was wise if not reckless. They put me in an aviator's 
rig with the addition of a life-belt in case we should 
get a ducking in the channel and I climbed up into 



ON THE AERIAL FERRY 247 

my position for the long run, a roomy place in the 
semi-circular bow of the beast which was ordinarily 
occupied by a machine gun and gunner. 

" She's a good old 'bus, very steady. You'll like 
her," said one of the group of youngsters look- 
ing on. 

There were no straps, these being quite unneces- 
sary, but also there was no seat. 

" What is a la mode? " I asked. 

" Stand up if you like ! " 

" Or sit on the edge and let your feet hang 
over! " 

We were all laughing, for the aviation corps is 
never gloomy. It rises and alights and fights and 
dies smilingly. 

11 1 like your hospitality, but not having been 
trained to trapeze work I'll play the Turk," I re- 
plied, squatting with legs crossed; and in this posi- 
tion I was able to look over the railing right and 
left and forward. The world was mine. 

Flight being no new thing in the year 19 16, I shall 
not indulge in any rhetoric. The pertinence of the 
experience was entirely in the fact that I was taking 
the aerial ferry which sent twenty planes a day to 
France on an average and perhaps fifty when the 
weather had held up traffic the previous day. I was 
to buffet the clouds instead of the waves on a 
crowded steamer and have a glimpse behind the cur- 



248 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

tains of military secrecy of the wonders of resource 
and organization, which are a commonplace to the 
wonder-workers themselves. 

It was to be a straight, business flight, a matter 
of routine, a flight without any loitering on the way 
or covering unnecessary distance to reach the destina- 
tion. There would be risks enough for the plane 
when it crossed into the enemy's area with its 
machine gun in position. The gleam of two lines 
of steel of a railroad set our course. After we had 
risen to a height of three or four thousand feet an 
occasional dash of rain whipped your face, and 
again the soft mist of a cloud. 

It was real English weather, overcast; and Eng- 
land plotted under your eye, a vast garden with its 
hedges, fields and quiet villages, had never been so 
fully realized in its rich greens. We overtook 
trains going in our direction and passed trains 
going in the opposite direction under their trailing 
spouts of steam. Only an occasional encampment 
of tents suggested that the land was at war. The 
soft light melted the different tones of the land- 
scape together in a dreamy whole and always the 
impression was of a land loved for its hedges, its 
pastures and its island seclusion, loved as a garden. 
In order to hold it secure this plane was flying and 
the great army in France was fighting. 

After forty minutes of the exhilaration of flight 



ON THE AERIAL FERRY 249 

which never grows stale, the pilot thumped one of 
the wings which gave out the sound of a drumhead 
to attract my attention and indicated an immense 
white arrow on a pasture pointing toward the bank 
of mist that hid the channel. This was the guide- 
post of the aerial ferry. He wheeled around it in 
order to give me a better view, which was his only 
departure from routine before, on the line of the 
arrow's pointing, he took his course, leaving the 
railroad behind, while ahead the green carpet 
seemed to end in a vaporish horizon. 

Usually as they rose for the channel crossing 
pilots ascended to a height of ten thousand feet, in 
order that they should have range in case of engine 
trouble for a long glide which might permit them 
to reach shore, or, if they must alight in the sea, 
to descend close to a vessel. In both England and 
France along the established aerial pathway are 
certain way stations fit to give rubber tires a soft 
welcome, with gasoline in store if a fresh supply is 
required. It was the pride of my pilot, who had 
formerly been in the navy and had come from South 
Africa to " do his bit," that in twenty crossings he 
had never had to make a stop. To-day the clouds 
kept us down to an altitude of only four thousand 
feet. 

Hills and valleys do not exist, all landscape being 
flat to the aviator's eye, as we know; but against 



250 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

reason some mental kink made me feel that this 
optical law should not apply to the chalk cliffs when 
we came to the coast, where only the green sward 
which crowns them was visible and beyond this a 
line of gray, the beach, which had an edge of white 
lace that was moving — the surf. 

Soldiers who were returning from leave in the 
regular way were having a jumpy passage, as one 
knew by the whitecaps that looked like tiny white 
flowers on a pewter cloth; only if you looked 
steadily at one it disappeared and others appeared 
in its place. Otherwise, the channel in a heavy sea 
was as still as a painted ocean with painted ships 
which, however fast they were moving, were mak- 
ing no headway to us traveling as smoothly in our 
'bus as a motor boat on a glassy lake. 

I looked at my watch as we crossed the lace edging 
on the English side and again as we crossed it on 
the French side. The time elapsed was seventeen 
and a half minutes, which is not rapid going, even 
for the broader part of the channel which we chose. 
The fastest plane, I am told, has made it at the 
narrowest point in eight and a half minutes. Not 
going as high as usual, the pilot did not speed his 
motor, as the lower the altitude the more uncom- 
fortable might be the result of engine trouble to his 
passenger. 

Now, however, we were rising midway of the 



ON THE AERIAL FERRY 251 

crossing into the gray bank overhead; one second 
the channel floor was there and the next it was not. 
Underneath us was mist and ahead and behind and 
above us only mist, soft and cool against the face. 
We were wholly out of sight of land and water, 
above the clouds, detached from earth, lost in the 
sky between England and France. 

This was the great moment to me. I was away 
from the sound of the guns; from the headlines of 
newspapers announcing the latest official bulletins; 
from prisoners' camps and casualty clearing sta- 
tions; from dugouts and trenches and the Ridge. 
Here was real peace, the peace of the infinite — and 
no one could ask you when you thought the war 
would be over. You were nobody, yet again you 
were the whole population of the world, you and 
the aviator and the plane, perfectly helpless in one 
sense and in another gloriously secure. Even he 
seemed a part of the machine carrying you swiftly 
on, without any sense of speed except the driving 
freshness of the air in your face. I felt that I 
should not mind going on forever. Time was un- 
limited. There was only space and the humming 
of the motor and the faintly gleaming circle of light 
of the propeller and those two rigid wings with 
their tracery of braces. 

We were not long out of sight of land and water, 
but long enough to make one wish to fly over the 



252 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

channel again, the next time at ten thousand feet, 
when it was a gleaming swath hidden at times by 
patches of luminous nimbus. 

The engine stopped. There was the silence of 
the clouds, cushioned silence, cushioned by the mist. 
Next, we were on a noiseless toboggan and when 
we came to the end of a glide of a thousand feet 
or more, France loomed ahead with its lacework of 
surf and an expanse of chalk cliffs at an angle and 
landscape rising out of the haze. A few minutes 
more and the salt thread that kept Napoleon out 
of England and has kept Germany out of England 
was behind us. We were over the continent of 
Europe. 

I had never before understood the character of 
both England and France so well. England was 
many little gardens correlated by roads and lanes; 
France was one great garden. Majestic in their sug- 
gestion of spaciousness were those broad stretches 
of hedgeless, fenceless fields, their crop lines sharply 
drawr as are all lines from a plane, fields between 
the plots of woodland and the villages and towns, 
revealing a land where all the soil is tilled. 

Soon we were over camps that I knew and long, 
straight highways that I had often traveled in my 
comings and goings. But how empty seemed the 
roads where you were always passing motor trucks 
and guns ! Long, gray streaks with occasional specks 



ON THE AERIAL FERRY 253 

which, as you rose to a greater height, were lost like 
scattered beads melting into a ribbon! Reserve 
trenches that I had known, too, were white tracings 
on a flat surface in their standard contour of 
traverses. There was the chateau where I had lived 
for months. Yes, I could identify that, and there 
the town where we went to market. 

We flew around the tower of a cathedral low 
enough to see the people moving in the streets, and 
then, in a final long glide, after an hour and fifty 
minutes in the air, the rubber wheels touched earth, 
rose and touched it again before the steady old 'bus 
slowed down not far from another plane that had 
arrived only a few minutes previously. When a 
day of good weather follows a day of bad and the 
arrivals are frequent, planes are flopping about this 
aerodrome like so many penguins before they are 
marshaled by the busy attendants in line along the 
edge of the field or under the shelter of hangars. 

We had had none of those thrilling experiences 
which are supposed to happen to aerial joy-riders, 
but had made a perfectly safe, normal trip, which, 
I repeat, was the real point of this wonderful busi- 
ness of the aerial ferry. I went into the office and 
officially reported my arrival at the same time that 
the pilot reported delivery of his plane. 

" Good-night," he said. " I'm off to catch the 
steamer to bring over another 'bus to-morrow." 



254 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

Waiting near by was my car and soldier chauffeur, 
who asked, in his quiet English way, if I had had 
" a good flight, sir; " and soon I was back in the 
atmosphere of the army as the car sped along the 
road, past camps, villages and motor trucks, until 
in the moonlight, as we came over a hill, the 
cathedral tower of Amiens appeared above the dark 
mass of the town against the dim horizon. 



XX 

THE EVER MIGHTY GUNS 

A thousand guns at the master's call — Schoolmaster of the guns — 
More and more guns but never too many — The gunner's skill 
which has life and death at stake — " Grandmother " first of the 
fifteen-inch howitzers — Soldier-mechanics — War still a matter 
of missiles — Improvements in gunnery — Third rail of the 
battlefield — The game of guns checkmating guns — A Niagira 
of death — A giant tube of steel painted in frog patches. 

How reconcile that urbane gunner-general, a genius 
among experts you were told, as the master of a 
thunderous magic which shot its deadly lightnings 
over the German area ! Let him move a red pin on 
the map and a tractor was towing a nine-inch gun to a 
new position; a black pin and a battery of eighteen 
pounders took the road. A thousand guns answered 
his call with a hundred thousand shells when it 
pleased him. I stood in awe of him, for chaos 
seemed to be doing his bidding at the end of a push- 
button. 

Whirlwind curtains of fire and creeping and leap- 
ing curtains were his familiar servants, and he set 
the latest fashion by his improvements. Had the 
French or the Germans something new? This he 
applied. Had he something new? He passed on 

255 



256 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

the method to the French and gave the Germans 
the benefit of its results. 

Observers seated in the baskets of observation 
balloons, aeroplanes circling low in risk of anti- 
aircraft fire, men sitting in tree-tops and others in 
front-line trenches spotting the fall of shells were 
the eyes for the science he was working out on his 
map. Those nests and lines of guns that seemed 
to be simply sending shells into the blue from their 
hiding-places played fortissimo and pianissimo under 
his baton. He correlated their efforts, gave them 
purpose and system in their roaring traffic of pro- 
jectiles. 

Where Sir Douglas Haig was schoolmaster of 
the whole, he was schoolmaster of the guns. After 
the grim days of the salient, when he worked with 
relics from fortresses and anything that could be 
improvised against the German artillery, came the 
latest word in black-throated, fiery-tongued mon- 
sters from England where the new gunners had 
learned their ABC's and he and his assistants were 
to teach them solid geometry and calculus and give 
them a toilsome experience, which was still more 
useful. 

His host kept increasing as more and more guns 
arrived, but never too many. There cannot be too 
many. Plant them as thick as trees in a forest for 
a depth of six or eight miles and there would not 



THE EVER MIGHTY GUNS 257 

be enough by the criterion of the infantry, to whom 
the fortunes of war increasingly related to the 
nature of the artillery support. He must have 
smiled with the satisfaction of a farmer over a big 
harvest yield that filled the granary as the stack of 
shells at an ammunition depot spread over the field, 
and he could go among his guns with the pride of 
a landowner among his flocks. He knew all the 
diseases that guns were heir to and their weak- 
nesses of temperament. A gun doctor was part of the 
establishment. This specialist went among the guns 
and felt of their pulses and listened to accounts of 
their symptoms and decided whether they could be 
cared for at a field hospital or would have to go 
back to the base. 

Temperament ? An old eight-inch howitzer which 
has helped in a dozen curtains of fire and blown in 
numerous dugouts may be a virtuoso for tempera- 
ment. Many things enter into mastery of the magic 
of the thunders, from clear eyesight of observers 
who see accurately to precision of gunner's skill, of 
powder, of fuse, of a hundred trifles which can 
never be too meticulously watched. The erring 
inspector of munitions far away oversea by an over- 
sight may cost the lives of many soldiers or change 
the fate of a charge. 

Comparable only with the surgeon's skill in the 
skill which has life and death as the stake of its 



258 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

result is the gunner's. The surgeon is trying to 
save one life which a slip of the knife may destroy; 
the gunner is trying both to save and to take life. 
In the gunner's skill life that is young and sturdy, 
muscles that are hardened by exercise and drill, 
manhood in its pink, must place its trust. A little 
carelessness or the slightest error and monsters 
with their long, fiery reach may strike you in the 
back instead of the enemy in front, and instead of 
dead and wounded and capitulation among smashed 
dugouts and machine gun positions you may be 
received by showers of bombs. No wonder that 
gunners work hard ! No wonder that discipline is 
tightened by the screw of fearful responsibility! 

At the front we had a sort of reverence for 
Grandmother, the first of the fifteen-inch howitzers 
to arrive as the belated answer of " prepared Eng- 
land " who " forced the war " on " unprepared 
Germany " to the famous forty-two centimeters 
that pounded Liege and Maubeuge. Gently Grand- 
mother with her ugly mouth and short neck and 
mammoth supporting ribs of steel was moved and 
nursed; for she, too, was temperamental. After- 
ward, Grandfather came and Uncle and Cousin and 
Aunt and many grown sons and daughters, until the 
British could have turned the city of Lille into ruins 
had they chosen ; but they kept their destruction for 
the villages on the Somme, which represent a prop- 



THE EVER MIGHTY GUNS 259 

erty loss remarkably small, as the average village 
could be rebuilt for not over two hundred thousand 
dollars. 

Other children of smaller caliber also arrived in 
surprising numbers. Make no mistake about that 
nine-inch howitzer, which appears to be only a mon- 
strous tube of steel firing a monstrous shell, not be- 
ing a delicately adjusted piece of mechanism. The 
gunner, his clothes oil-soaked, who has her breech 
apart pays no attention to the field of guns around 
him or the burst of a shell a hundred yards away, 
no more than the man with a motor breakdown 
pays to passing traffic. Is he a soldier? Yes, by 
his uniform, but primarily a mechanic, this man 
from Birmingham, who is polishing that heavy 
piece of steel which, when it locks in the breech, 
holds the shell fast in place and allows all the force 
of the explosion to pass through the muzzle, while 
the recoil cylinder takes up the shock as nicely as on 
a battleship, with no tremble of the base set in the 
debris of a village. He shakes his head, this pre- 
occupied mechanician. It may be necessary to call 
in the gun doctor. His " how " has been in service 
a long time, but is not yet showing the signs of gen- 
eral debility of the eight-inch battery near by. 
They have fired three times their allowance and 
are still good for sundry purposes in the gunner- 
general's play of red and black pins on his map. 



260 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

The life of guns has surpassed all expectations ; but 
the smaller calibers forward and the soixante- 
quinze must not suffer from general debility when 
they lay on a curtain of fire to cover a charge. 

War is still a matter of projectiles, of missiles 
thrown by powder, whether cannon or rifle, as it 
was in Napoleon's time, the change being in range, 
precision and destructive power. The only new 
departure is the aeroplane, for the gas attack is 
another form of the Chinese stink-pot and our old 
mystery friend Greek fire may claim antecedence to 
the Flammenwerfer. The tank with its machine guns 
applied the principle of projectiles from guns be- 
hind armor. Steel helmets would hardly be con- 
sidered an innovation by mediaeval knights. Bombs 
and hand grenades and mortars are also old forms 
of warfare, and close-quarter fighting with the 
bayonet, as was evident to all practical observers 
before the war, will endure as long as the only way 
to occupy a position is by the presence of men on 
the spot and as long as the defenders fight to hold 
it in an arena free of interference by guns which 
must hold their fire in fear of injury to your own 
soldiers as well as to the enemy. 

With all the inventive genius of Europe applied 
in this war, the heat-ray or any other revolutionary 
means of killing which would make guns and rifles 
powerless has not been developed. It is still a ques- 



THE EVER MIGHTY GUNS 261 

tion of throwing or shooting projectiles accurately 
at your opponent, only where once it was javelin, 
or spear, or arrow, now it is a matter of shells for 
anywhere from one mile to twenty miles; and the 
more hits that you could make with javelins or 
arrows and can make with shells the more likely it 
is that victory will incline to your side. Where 
flights of arrows hid the sun, barrages now blanket 
the earth. 

The improvement in shell fire is revolutionary 
enough of itself. Steadily the power of the guns 
has increased. What they may accomplish is well 
illustrated by the account of a German battalion on 
the Somme. When it was ten miles from the front 
a fifteen-inch shell struck in its billets just before it 
was ordered forward. On the way luck was against 
it at every stage of progress and it suffered in turn 
from nine-inch, eight-inch and six-inch shells, not to 
mention bombs from an aviator flying low, and 
afterward from eighteen pounders. When it reached 
the trenches a preliminary bombardment was the 
stroke of fate that led to the prompt capitulation of 
some two hundred survivors to a British charge. 
The remainder of the thousand men was practically 
all casualties from shell-bursts, which, granting some 
exaggeration in a prisoner's tale, illustrates what 
killing the guns may wreak if the target is under 
their projectiles. 



262 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

The gunnery of 19 15 seems almost amateurish to 
that of 19 1 6, a fact hardly revealed to the public 
by its reading of bulletins and of such a quantity of 
miscellaneous information that the significance of 
it becomes obscure. At the start of the war the 
Germans had the advantage of many mobile 
howitzers and immense stores of high explosive 
shells, while the French were dependent on their 
soixante-quinze and shrapnel; and at this disadvan- 
tage the brilliancy of their work with this wonder- 
ful field gun on the Marne and in Lorraine was the 
most important contributary factor in saving France 
next to the vital one of French courage and organi- 
zation. The Allies had to follow the German suit 
with howitzers and high explosive shells and the cry 
for more and more guns and more and more muni- 
tions for the business of blasting your enemy and 
his positions to bits became universal. 

The first barrage, or curtain of fire, ever used to 
my knowledge was a feeble German effort in the 
Ypres salient in the autumn of 19 14, though the 
French drum fire distributed over a certain area 
had, in a sense, a like effect. To make certain of 
clearness about fundamentals familiar to those at 
the front but to the general public only a symbol 
for something not understood, a curtain of fire is 
a swath of fragments and bullets from bursting 
projectiles which may stop a charge or prevent 



THE EVER MIGHTY GUNS 263 

reserves from coming to the support of the front 
line. It is a barrier of death, the third rail of the 
battlefield. From the sky shrapnel descend with 
their showers of bullets, while the high explosives 
heave up the earth under foot. Shrapnel largely 
went out of fashion in the period when high explo- 
sives smashed in trenches and dugouts; but the 
answer was deeper dugouts too stoutly roofed to 
permit of penetration and shrapnel returned to play 
a leading part again, as we shall see in the descrip- 
tion of a charge under an up-to-date curtain of fire 
in another chapter. 

Counter-battery work is another one of the 
gunner-general's cares, which requires, as it were, 
the assistance of the detective branch. Before you 
can fight you must find the enemy's guns in their 
hiding-places or take a chance on the probable loca- 
tion of his batteries, which will ordinarily seek 
every copse, every sunken road and every reverse 
slope. The interesting captured essay on British 
fighting methods, by General von Arnim, the gen- 
eral in command of the Germans opposite the Brit- 
ish on the Somme, with its minutiae of directions 
indicative of how seriously he regarded the New 
Army, mentioned the superior means of reporting 
observations to the guns used by British aeroplanes 
and warned German gunners against taking what 
had formerly been obvious cover, because Brit- 



264 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

ish artillery never failed to concentrate on those 
spots with disastrous results. 

Where aeroplanes easily detect lines, be they 
roads or a column of infantry, as I have said, a 
battery in the open with guns and gunners the tint 
of the landscape is not readily distinguishable at 
the high altitude to which anti-aircraft gunfire 
restricts aviators. When a concentration begins on 
a battery, either the gunners must go to their dug- 
outs or run beyond the range of the shells until the 
" strafe " is over. If A could locate all of B's guns 
and had two thousand guns of his own to keep B's 
two thousand silenced by counter-battery work and 
two thousand additional to turn on B's infantry 
positions, it would be only a matter of continued 
charges under cover of curtains of fire until the 
survivors, under the gusts of shells with no support 
from their own guns, would yield against such 
ghastly, hopeless odds. 

Such is the power of the guns — and such the game 
of guns checkmating guns — in their effort to stop 
the enemy's curtains of fire while maintaining their 
own that the genius who finds a divining rod which, 
from a sausage balloon, will point out the position 
of every enemy battery has fame awaiting him sec- 
ond only to that of the inventor of a system of dis- 
tilling a death-dealing heat ray from the sun. 

And the captured gun ! It is a prize no less dear 



THE EVER MIGHTY GUNS 265 

to the infantry's heart to-day than it was a hundred 
years ago. Our battalion took a battery! There 
is a thrill for every officer and man and all the 
friends at home. Muzzle cracked by a direct hit, 
recoil cylinder broken, wheels in kindling wood, 
shield fractured — there you have a trophy which is 
proof of accuracy to all gunners and an everlast- 
ing memorial in the town square to the heroism of 
the men of that locality. 

In the gunners' branch of the corps or division 
staff (which may be next door to the telephone 
exchange where " Hello! " soldiers are busy all day 
keeping guns, infantry, transport, staff and units, 
large and small, in touch) the visitor will linger 
as he listens to the talk of shop by these experts 
in mechanical destruction. Generic discussions 
about which caliber of gun is most efficient for this 
and that purpose have the floor when the result of 
a recent action does not furnish a fresher topic. 
There are faddists and old fogies of course, as in 
every other band of experts. The reports of the 
infantry out of its experience under shell-bursts, 
which should be the gospel, may vary; for the 
infantry think well of the guns when the charge 
goes home with casualties light and ill when the 
going is bad. 

Every day charts go up to the commanders show- 
ing the expenditure of ammunition and the stock 



266 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

of different calibers on hand; for the army is a most 
fastidious bookkeeper. Always there must be im- 
mense reserves for an emergency, and on the Somme 
a day's allowance when the battle was only " growl- 
ing " was a month's a year previous. Let the gen- 
eral say the word and fifty thousand more shells 
will be fired on Thursday than on Wednesday. He 
throws off and on the switch of a Niagara of death. 
The infantry is the Oliver Twist of incessant de- 
mand. It would like a score of batteries turned on 
one machine gun, all the batteries in the army 
against a battalion front, and a sheet of shells in 
the air night and day, as you yourself would wish 
if you were up in the firing-line. 

Guardians of the precious lives of their own men 
and destroyers of the enemy's, the guns keep vigil. 
Every night the flashes on the horizon are a 
reminder to those in the distance that the battle 
never ends. Their voices are like none other except 
guns; the flash from their muzzles is as suggestive 
as the spark from a dynamo, which says that death 
is there for reaching out your hand. Something 
docile is in their might, like the answering of the 
elephant's bulk to the mahout's command, in their 
noiseless elevation and depression, and the bigger 
they are the smoother appears their recoil as they 
settle back into place ready for another shot. The 
valleys where the guns hide play tricks with acous- 



THE EVER MIGHTY GUNS 267 

tics. I have sat on a hill with a dozen batteries fir- 
ing under the brow and their crashes were hardly 
audible. 

" Only an artillery preparation, sir ! " said an 
artilleryman as we started up a slope stiff with guns, 
as the English say, all firing. You waited your 
chance to run by after a battery had fired and were on 
the way toward the next one before the one behind 
sent another round hurtling overhead. 

The deep-throated roar of the big calibers is not 
so hard on the ears as the crack of the smaller 
calibers. Returning, you go in face of the blasts 
and then, though it rarely happens, you have in 
mind, if you have ever been in front of one, the 
awkward possibility of a premature burst of a shell 
in your face. Signs tell you where those black 
mouths which you might not see are hidden, lest you 
walk straight into one as it belches flame. When 
you have seen guns firing by thousands as far as the 
eye can reach from a hill; when you have seen every 
caliber at work and your head aches from the noise, 
the thing becomes overpowering and monotonous. 
Yet you return again, drawn by the uncanny fasci- 
nation of artillery power. 

Riding home one day after hours with the guns 
in an attack, I saw for the first time one of the mon- 
ster railroad guns firing as I passed by on the road. 
Would I get out to watch it? I hesitated. Yes, of 



268 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

course. But it was only another gun, a giant tube 
of steel painted in frog patches to hide it from 
aerial observation; only another gun, though it sent 
a two-thousand-pound projectile to a target ten miles 
away, which a man from a sausage balloon said 
was " on." 



XXI 

BY THE WAY 

The River Somrae — Amiens cathedral — Sunday afternoon prom- 
enaders — Women, old men and boys — A prosperous old town 
— M?Jame of the little Restaurant des Huitres — The old waiter 
at the hotel — The stork and the sea-gull — Distinguished visi- 
tors — Horses and dogs — Water carts — Gossips of battle — The 
donkeys. 

What contrasts! There was none so pleasant as 
that when you took the river road homeward after 
an action. Leaving behind the Ridge and the 
scarred slope and the crowding motor trucks in their 
cloud of dust, you were in a green world soothing 
to eyes which were painful from watching shell- 
blasts. Along the banks of the Somme on a hot day 
you might see white figures of muscle-armored youth 
washed clean of the grime of the firing-line in the 
exhilaration of minutes, seconds, glowingly lived 
without regard to the morrow, shaking drops of 
water free from white skins, under the shade of trees 
untouched by shell fire, after a plunge in cool waters. 
Then from a hill where a panorama was flung free 
to the eye, the Somme at your feet held islands of 
peace in its shining net as it broke away from con- 
fining green walls and wound across the plain 
toward Amiens. 

269 



270 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

The Somme is kindly by nature with a desire to 
embrace all the country around, and Amiens has 
trained its natural bent to man's service. 

It gave softer springs than those of any ambu- 
lance for big motor scows that brought the badly 
wounded down from the front past the rich market 
gardens that sent their produce in other boats to 
market. Under bridges its current was divided and 
subdivided until no one could tell which was Somme 
and which canal, busy itself as the peasants and the 
shopkeepers doing a good turn to humankind, 
grinding wheat in one place and in another farther 
on turning a loom to weave the rich velvets for 
which Amiens is famous, and between its stages of 
usefulness supplying a Venetian effect where bal- 
conies leaned across one of its subdivisions, an area 
of old houses on crooked, short streets at their back 
* huddled with a kind of ancient reverence near the 
great cathedral. 

At first you might be discriminative about the 
exterior of Amiens cathedral, having in mind only 
the interior as being worth while. I went inside 
frequently and the call to go was strongest after 
seeing an action. Standing on that stone floor 
where princes and warriors had stood through eight 
hundred years of the history of France, I have seen 
looking up at the incomparable nave with its 
majestic symmetry, French poilus in their faded 



BY THE WAY 271 

blue, helmets in hand and perhaps the white of a 
bandage showing, spruce generals who had a few 
hours away from their commands, dust-laden dis- 
patch riders, boyish officers with the bit of blue rib- 
bon that they had won for bravery on their breasts 
and knots of privates in worn khaki. The man who 
had been a laborer before he put on uniform was 
possessed by the same awe as the one who had been 
favored by birth and education. A black-robed 
priest passing with his soft tread could not have 
differed much to the eye from one who was there 
when the Black Prince was fighting in France or 
the soldiers of Joan or of Conde came to look 
at the nave. 

The cathedral and the Somme helped to make 
you whole with the world and with time. After 
weeks you ceased to be discriminative about the 
exterior. The cathedral was simply the cathedral. 
Returning from the field, I knew where on every 
road I should have the first glimpse of its serene, 
assertive mass above the sea of roofs — always 
there, always the same, immortal; while the Ridge 
rocked with the Allied gun-blasts that formed the 
police line of fire for its protection. 

I liked to walk up the canal tow-path where the 
townspeople went on Sunday afternoons for their 
promenade, the blue of French soldiers on leave 
mingling with civilian black — soldiers with wives or 



272 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

mothers on their arms, safe for the time being. 
One scene reappears to memory as I write : A young 
fellow back from the trenches bearing his sturdy 
boy of two on his shoulder and the black-eyed 
young mother walking beside him, both having 
eyes for nothing in the world except the boy. 

The old fishermen would tell you as they waited 
for a bite that the German was fichu, their faith in 
the credit of France unimpaired as they lived on 
the income of the savings of their industry before 
they retired. You asked gardeners about business, 
which you knew was good with that ever-hungry 
and spendthrift British Army "bulling" the mar- 
ket. One day while taking a walk, Beach Thomas 
and I saw a diver preparing to go down to examine 
the abutment of a bridge and we sat down to look 
on with a lively interest, when we might have seen 
hundreds of guns firing. It was a change. Nights, 
after dispatches were written, Gibbs and I, anything 
but gory-minded, would walk in the silence, having 
the tow-path to ourselves, and after a mutual agree- 
ment to talk of anything but the war would revert 
to the same old subject. 

On other days when only "nibbling" was pro- 
ceeding on the Ridge you might strike across coun- 
try over the stubble, flushing partridges from the 
clover. And the women, the old men and the boys 
got in all the crops. How I do not know, except 



BY THE WAY 273 

by rising early and keeping at it until dark, which 
is the way that most things worth while are accom- 
plished in this world. Those boys from ten to six- 
teen who were driving the plow for next year's 
sowing had become men in their steadiness. 

Amiens was happy in the memory of the frustra- 
tion of what might have happened when her citizens 
looked at the posters, already valuable relics, that 
had been put up by von Kluck's army as it passed 
through on the way to its about-face on the Marne. 
The old town, out of the battle area, out of the 
reach of shells, had prospered exceedingly. Shop- 
keepers, particularly those who sold oysters, fresh 
fish, fruits, cheese, all delicacies whatsoever to vic- 
tims of iron rations in the trenches, could retire on 
their profits unless they died from exhaustion in 
accumulating more. They took your money so 
politely that parting with it was a pleasure, no mat- 
ter what the prices, though they were always lower 
for fresh eggs than in New York. 

We came to know all with the intimacy that war 
develops, but for sheer character and energy the 
blue ribbon goes to Madame of the little Restaurant 
des Huitres. She needed no gallant husband to 
make her a marshal's wife, as in the case of Sans- 
Gene, for she was a marshal herself. She should 
have the croix de guerre with all the stars and a 
palm, too, for knowing how to cook. A small stove 



274 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

which was as busy with its sizzling pans as a bomb- 
ing party stood at the foot of a cramped stairway, 
whose ascent revealed a few tables, with none for 
two and everybody sitting elbow to elbow, as it 
were, in the small dining-room. There were dishes 
enough and clean, too, and spotless serviettes, but 
no display of porcelain and silver was necessary, for 
the food was a sufficient attraction. Madame was 
all for action. If you did not order quickly she did 
so for you, taking it for granted that a wavering 
mind indicated a palate that called for arbitrary 
treatment. 

She had a machine gun tongue on occasion. If 
you did not like her restaurant it was clear that 
other customers were waiting for your place, and 
generals capitulated as promptly as lieutenants. A 
camaraderie developed at table under the spur of 
her dynamic presence and her occasional artillery 
concentrations, which were brief and decisive, for 
she had no time to waste. Broiled lobster and sole, 
oysters, filets and chops, sizzling fried potatoes, 
crisp salads, mountains of forest strawberries with 
pots of thick cream and delectable coffee descended 
from her hands, with no mistake in any orders or 
delay in the prompt succession of courses, on the 
cloth before you by some legerdemain of manipula- 
tion in the narrow quarters to the accompaniment 
of her repartee. It was past understanding how 



BY THE WAY 275 

she accomplished such results in quantity and qual- 
ity on that single stove with the help of one assistant 
whom, apparently, she found in the way at times ; for 
the assistant would draw back in the manner of one 
who had put her finger into an electric fan as her 
mistress began a manipulation of pots and pans. 

If Madame des Huitres should come to New 
York, I wonder — yes, she would be overwhelmed 
by people who had anything like a trench appetite. 
Soon she would be capitalized, with branches des 
Huitres up and down the land, while she would 
no longer touch a skillet, but would ride in a 
limousine and grow fat, and I should not like her 
any more. 

People who could not get into des Huitres or 
were not in the secret which, I fear, was selfishly 
kept by those who were, had to dine at the hotel, 
where a certain old waiter — all young ones being 
at the front — though called mad could be made the 
object of method if he had not method in madness. 
When he seemed about to collapse with fatigue, 
tell him that there had been a big haul of German 
prisoners on the Ridge and the blaze of delight in 
his dark eyes would galvanize him. If he should 
falter again, a shout of, " Vive I'Entente cordiale! 
En avant!" would send him off with coat-tails at 
right angles to his body as he sprang into the midst 
of the riot of waiters outside the kitchen door, from 



276 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

which he would emerge triumphantly bearing the 
course that was next in order. Nor would he allow 
you to skip one. You must take them all or, as 
the penalty of breaking up the system, you went 
hungry. 

Outside in the court where you went for coffee 
and might sometimes get it if you gave the head 
waiter good news from the front, a stork and a sea- 
gull with clipped wings posed at the fountain. 
What tales of battle were told in sight of this incon- 
gruous pair whose antics relieved the strain of war ! 
When the stork took a step or two the gull plodded 
along after him and when the gull moved the stork 
also moved, the two never being more than three 
or four feet apart. Yet each maintained an atti- 
tude of detachment as if loath to admit the slightest 
affection for each other. Foolish birds, as many 
said and laughed at them; and again, heroes out 
of the hell on the Ridge and wholly unconscious of 
their heroism said that the two had the wisdom 
of the ages, particularly the stork, though expert 
artillery opinion was that the practical gull thought 
that only his own watchfulness kept the wisdom of 
the ages from being drowned in the fountain in an 
absent-minded moment, though the water was not 
up to a stork's ankle-joint. More nonsense, when 
the call was for reaction from the mighty drama, 
was woven around these entertainers by men who 



BY THE WAY 277 

could not go to plays than would be credible to 
people reading official bulletins; woven by dining 
parties of officers who when dusk fell went indoors 
and gathered around the piano before going into a 
charge on the morrow. 

At intervals men in civilian clothes, soft hats, 
gaiters over everyday trousers, golf suits, hunting 
suits, appeared at the hotel or were seen stalking 
about captured German trenches, their garb as odd 
in that ordered world of khaki as powdered wig, 
knee-breeches and silver buckles strolling up Pic- 
cadilly or Fifth Avenue. Prime ministers, Cabinet 
members, great financiers, potentates, journalists, 
poets, artists of many nationalities came to do the 
town. They saw the Ridge under its blanket of 
shell-smoke, the mighty columns of transport, all the 
complex, enormous organization of that secret 
world, peeked into German dugouts, and in com- 
mon with all observers estimated the distance of the 
nearest shell-burst from their own persons. 

Many were amazed to find that generals worked 
in chateaux over maps, directing by telephone, 
instead of standing on hilltops to give their com- 
mands, and that war was a systematic business, which 
made those who had been at the front writing and 
writing to prove that it was wonder if nobody read 
what they wrote. An American who said that he 
did not see why all the trucks and horses and wagons 



278 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

and men did not lose their way was suggestive of 
the first vivid impressions which the " new eye " 
brought to the scene. Another praised my first 
book for the way it had made life at the front 
clear and then proceeded to state his surprise at 
finding that trenches did not run straight, but in 
traverses, and that soldiers lived in houses instead 
of tents and gunners did not see their targets. Now 
he had seen this mighty army at work for himself. 
It is the only way. I give up hope of making others 
see it. 

So grim the processes of fighting, so lacking in 
picturesqueness, that one welcomed any of the old 
symbols of war. I regretted yet rejoiced that the 
horse was still a factor. It was good to think that 
the gasoline engine had saved the sore backs of the 
pack animals of other days, removed the horror of 
dead horses beside the road and horses driven to 
exhaustion by the urgency of fierce necessity, and 
that a shell in the transport meant a radiator 
smashed instead of flesh torn and scattered. Yet 
the horse was still serving man at the front and the 
dog still flattering him. I have seen dogs lying dead 
on the field where the mascot of a battalion had run 
along with the men in a charge ; dogs were found in 
German dugouts, and one dog adopted by a corps 
staff had refused to leave the side of his fallen mas- 
ter, a German officer, until the body was removed. 



BY THE WAY 279 

The horse brought four-footed life into the dead 
world of the slope, patiently drawing his load, 
mindless of gun-blasts and the shriek of shell- 
fragments once he was habituated to them. As he 
can pass over rough ground, he goes into areas 
where no motor vehicle except the tanks may go. 
He need not wait on the road-builders before he 
takes the eighteen pounders to their new positions 
or follows them with ammunition. Far out on the 
field I have seen groups of artillery horses waiting 
in a dip in the ground while their guns were within 
five hundred yards of the firing-line, and winding 
across dead fields toward an isolated battery the 
caisson horses trotting along with shells bursting 
around them. 

Upon August days when the breeze that passed 
overhead was only tantalization to men in com- 
munication trenches carrying up ammunition and 
bombs, when dugouts were ovens, when the sun 
made the steel helmet a hot skillet-lid over throb- 
bing temples, the horse-drawn water carts wound 
up the slope to assuage burning thirst and back 
again, between the gates of hell and the piping 
station, making no more fuss than a country post- 
man on his rounds. 

Practically all the water that the fighters had, 
aside from what was in their canteens, must 
be brought up in this way, for the village wells were 



280 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

filled with the remains of shell-crushed houses. 
Gossips of battle the water men, they and the 
stretcher-bearers both non-combatants going and 
coming under the shells up to the battle line, but 
particularly so the water men, who passed the time 
of day with every branch, each working in its own 
compartment. When the weather was bad the 
water man's business became slack and the lot of the 
stretcher-bearer grew worse in the mud. What 
stories the stretcher-bearers brought in of wounded 
blown off litters by shells, of the necessity of choos- 
ing the man most likely to survive when only one 
of two could be carried, of whispered messages 
from the dying, and themselves keeping to their 
work with cheery British phlegm; and the water 
men told of new gun positions, of where the shells 
were thickest, of how the fight was going. 

It irritated the water men, prosaic in their dis- 
regard of danger, to have a tank hit on the way out. 
If it were hit on the way back when it was empty 
this was of less account, for new tanks were wait- 
ing in reserve. Tragedy for them was when a horse 
was killed and often they returned with horses 
wounded. It did not occur to the man that he might 
be hit; it was the loss of a horse or a tank that 
worried him. One had his cart knocked over by a 
salvo of shells and set upright by the next, where- 
upon, according to the account, he said to his mare : 



BY THE WAY 281 

11 Come on, Mary, I always told you the Boches 
were bad shots ! " But there are too many stories 
of the water men to repeat without sifting. 

We must not forget the little donkeys which the 
French brought from Africa to take the place of 
men in carrying supplies up to the trenches. Single 
file they trotted along on their errand and they had 
their own hospitals for wounded. It is said that 
when curtains of fire began ahead they would throw 
forward their long ears inquiringly and hug close 
to the side of the trench for cover and even edge 
into a dugout with the men, who made room for 
as much donkey as possible, or when in the open 
they would seek the shelter of shell-craters. Lest 
their perspicacity be underrated, French soldiers 
even credited the wise elders among them with the 
ability to distinguish between different calibers of 
shells. 



XXII 

THE MASTERY OF THE AIR 

" Nose dives " and " crashers " — The most intense duels in his- 
tory — Aviators the pride of nations — Beauchamp — The D'Arta- 
gnan of the air — Mastery of the air — The aristocrat of war, the 
golden youth of adventure — Nearer immortality than any 
other living man can be — The British are reckless aviators — 
Aerial influence on the soldier's psychology — Varieties of aero- 
planes — Immense numbers of aeroplanes in the battles in the 
air. 

Wing tip touching wing tip two phantoms passed 
in the mist fifteen thousand feet above the earth 
and British plane and German plane which had 
grazed each other were lost in the bank of cloud. 
The dark mass which an aviator sees approaching 
when he is over the battlefield proves to be a fifteen- 
inch shell at the top of its parabola which passes 
ten feet over his head. A German aviator thinking 
he is near home circles downward on an overcast 
day toward a British aerodrome to find out his mis- 
take too late, and steps out of his machine to be 
asked by his captors if he won't come in and have 
tea. Thus, true accounts that come to the aviators' 
mess make it unnecessary to carry your imagination 
with you at the front. 

They talk of " nose dives " and " crashers," 
282 



THE MASTERY OF THE AIR 283 

which mean the way an enemy's plane was brought 
down, and although they have no pose or theatrical- 
ism the consciousness of belonging to the wonder 
corps of modern war is not lacking. One returns 
from a flight and finds that a three-inch anti- 
aircraft gun-shell has gone through the body of his 
plane. 

"So that was it! Hardly felt it!" he said. 

If the shell had exploded? Oh, well, that is a 
habit of shells; and in that case the pilot would be 
in the German lines unrecognizable among the 
debris of his machine after a " crasher." 

Where in the old West gunmen used to put a 
notch on their revolver handle for every man killed, 
now in each aviator's record is the number of 
enemy planes which he has brought down. When 
a Frenchman has ten his name goes into the official 
bulletin. Everything contributes to urge on the 
fighting aviator to more and more victims till one 
day he, too, is a victim. Never were duels so 
detached or so intense. No clashing of steel, no 
flecks of blood, only two men with wings. While the 
soldier feels his weapon go home and the bomber 
sees his bomb in flight, the aviator watches for 
his opponent to drop forward in his seat as the first 
sign that he has lost control of his plane and of 
victory, and he does not hear the passing of the bul- 
lets that answer those from his own machine gun. 



284 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

One hero comes to take the place of another who 
has been lost. A smiling English youth was 
embarrassed when asked how he brought down 
the great Immelmann, most famous of German 
aviators. 

Nelson's " Death or Westminster Abbey " has be- 
come paraphrased to " Death or the communique." 
At twenty-one, while a general of division is un- 
known except in the army an aviator's name may 
be the boast of a nation. In him is expressed the 
national imagination, the sense of hero-worship 
which people love to personify. The British avia- 
tion corps stuck to anonymity until the giving of a 
Victoria Cross one day revealed that Lieutenant 
Ball had brought down his twenty-sixth German 
plane. 

Soon after the taking of Fort Douaumont when 
I was at Verdun, Beauchamp, blond, blue-eyed and 
gentle of manner, who had thrilled all France by 
bombing Essen, said, " Now they will expect me to 
go farther and do something greater;" and I was 
not surprised to learn a month later that he had 
been killed. Something in the way he spoke con- 
vinced me that he foresaw death and accepted it as 
a matter of course; and he realized, too, the penalty 
of being a hero. He had flown over Essen and 
dropped his bombs and seen them burst, which was 
all of his story. 



THE MASTERY OF THE AIR 285 

The public thrill over such exploits is the greater 
because of their simplicity. An aviator has no ex- 
periences on the road; he cannot stop to talk to 
anyone. There is flight; there is a lever that releases 
a bomb; there is a machine gun. He may not 
indulge in psychology, which would be wool- 
gathering, when every faculty is objectively occu- 
pied. He is strangely helpless, a human being 
borne through space by a machine, and when he 
returns to the mess he really has little to tell except 
as it relates to mechanism and technique. 

The Royal Flying Corps, which is the official 
name, never wants for volunteers. Ever the num- 
ber of pilots is in excess of the number of machines. 
Young men with embroidered wings on their 
breasts, which prove that they have qualified, waited 
on factories to turn out wings for flying. Flight 
itself is simple, but the initiative equal to great 
deeds is another thing. Here you revert to an 
innate gift of the individual who, finding in danger 
the zest of a glorious curiosity, the intoxica- 
tion of action, clear eye, steady hand answering 
lightning quickness of thought, becomes the D'Arta- 
gnan of the air. There is no telling what boyish 
neophyte will show a steady hand in daring the 
supreme hazards with light heart, or what man 
whom his friends thought was born for aviation 
may lack the touch of genius. 



286 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

Far up in the air there is an imaginary boundary 
line which lies over the battle line; and there is 
another which may be on your side or on the other 
side of the battle line. It is the location of the sec- 
ond line that tells who has the mastery of the air. 
A word of bare and impressive meaning this of 
mastery in war, which represents force without 
qualification; that the other man is down and you 
are up, the other fends and you thrust. More 
glorious than the swift rush of destroyer to a battle- 
ship that of the British planes whose bombs brought 
down six German sausage balloons in flames before 
the Grand Offensive began. 

I need never have visited an aerodrome on the 
Somme to know whether Briton and Frenchman or 
German was master of the air. The answer was 
there whenever you looked in the heavens in the 
absence of iron crosses on the hovering or scudding 
or turning plane wings and the multiplicity of bull's- 
eyes; in the abandoned way that both British and 
French pickets flew over the enemy area, as if space 
were theirs and they dared any interference. If you 
saw a German plane appear you could count three 
or four Allied planes appearing from different direc- 
tions to surround it. The German had to go or be 
caught in a cross fire, and maneuvered to his 
death. 

Mastery of the air is another essential of supe- 



THE MASTERY OF THE AIR 287 

riority for an offensive; one of the vital features in 
the organized whole of an attack. As you press 
men and guns forward enemy planes must not locate 
your movements. Your planes with fighting planes 
as interference must force a passage for your 
observers to spot the fall of shells on new targets, 
to assist in reporting the progress of charges and 
to play their proper auxiliary part in the complex 
system of army intelligence. 

Before the offensive new aerodromes began to 
appear along the front at the same time that new 
roads were building. An army that had lacked both 
planes and guns at the start now had both. Every 
aviator knew that he was expected to gain and hold 
the mastery; his part was set no less than that of 
the infantry. Where should " the spirit that 
quickeneth " dwell if not with the aviators? No 
weary legs hamper him; he does not have to crawl 
over the dead or hide in shell-craters or stand up 
to his knees in mire. He is the pampered aristocrat 
of war, the golden youth of adventure. 

He leaves a comfortable bed, with bath, a good 
breakfast, the comradeship of a pleasant mess, the 
care of servants, to mount his steed. When he 
returns he has only to step out of his seat. Me- 
chanics look after his plane and refreshment and 
shade in summer and warmth in winter await alike 
the spoiled child of the favored, adventurous corps 



288 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

who has not the gift and never quite dares the great 
hazards as well as the one who dares them to his 
certain end. All depends on the man. 

Rising ten or fifteen thousand feet, slipping in 
and out of clouds, the aviator breathes pure ozone 
on a dustless roadway, the world a carpet under 
him; and though death is at his elbow it is no grimy 
companion like death in the trenches. He is up or 
he is down, and when he is up the thrill that holds 
his faculties permits of no apprehensions. There is 
no halfway business of ghastly wounds which fore- 
doom survival as a cripple. Alive, he is nearer 
immortality than any other living man can be ; dead, 
his spirit leaves him while he is in the heavens. 
Death comes splendidly, quickly, and until the last 
moment he is trying to keep control of his machine. 
It is not for him to envy the days of cavalry 
charges. He does not depend upon the companion- 
ship of other men to carry him on, but is the auto- 
crat of his own fate, the ruler of his own dreams. 
All hours of daylight are the same to him. At any 
time he may be called to flight and perhaps to die. 
The glories of sunset and sunrise are his between 
the sun and the earth. 

You expect the British to be cool aviators, but 
with their phlegm, as we have seen, goes that 
singular love of risk, of adventure, which sends 
them to shoot tigers and climb mountains. Indeed, 



THE MASTERY OF THE AIR 289 

the Englishman's phlegm is a sort of leash holding 
in check a certain recklessness which his seeming 
casualness conceals. After it had become almost a 
law that no aviator should descend lower than 
twelve thousand feet, British aviators on the Somme 
descended to three hundred, emptied their machine 
guns into the enemy, and escaped the patter of rifle 
fire which the surprised German soldiers had hardly 
begun before the plane at two miles a minute or 
more was out of range. 

When Lord Kitchener was inspecting an aero- 
drome in France in 19 14 he said: " One day you will 
be flying and evoluting in squadrons like the navy; " 
and the aviators, then feeling their way step by step, 
smiled doubtfully, convinced that " K " had an 
imagination. A few months later the prophecy had 
come true and the types of planes had increased 
until they were as numerous as the types of guns. 

The swift falcon waiting fifteen thousand feet 
up for his prey to add another to his list in the 
communique is as distinct from the one in which I 
crossed the channel as the destroyer is from the 
cruiser and from some still bigger types as is the 
cruiser from a battleship. While the enemy was 
being fought down, bombs were dropped not by 
pounds but by tons on villages and billets, on am- 
munition dumps and rail-heads, adding their destruc- 
tion to that of the shells. 



290 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

There was more value in mastery than in de- 
struction or in freedom of observation, for it 
affected the enemy's morale. A soldier likes to see 
his own planes in the air and the enemy's being 
driven away. The aerial influence on his psychology 
is enormous, for he can watch the planes as he lies 
in a shell-crater with his machine gun or stands 
guard in the trench; he has glimpses of passing 
wings overhead between the bursts of shells. To 
know that his guns are not replying adequately and 
that every time one of his planes appears it is driven 
to cover takes the edge off initiative, courage and 
discipline, in the resentment that he is handi- 
capped. 

German prisoners used to say on the Somme that 
their aviators were " funks," though the Allied 
aviators knew that it was not their opponents' lack 
of courage which was the principal fault, even if 
they had lost morale from being the under dog 
and lacked British and French initiative, but numbers 
and material. It was resource against resource 
again; a fight in the delicate business of the manufac- 
ture of the fragile framework, of the wonderful 
engines with their short lives, and of the skilled bat- 
talions of workers in factories. The Germans had 
to bring more planes from another front in order 
to restore the balance. The Allies foreseeing this 
brought still more themselves, till the numbers were 



THE MASTERY OF THE AIR 291 

so immense that when a battle between a score of 
planes on either side took place no one dared ven- 
ture the opinion that the limit had been reached — 
not while there was so much room in the air and 
volunteers for the aviation corps were so plentiful. 



XXIII 

A PATENT CURTAIN OF FIRE 

Thiepval again — Director of tactics of an army corps — Graduates 
of Staff Colleges — Army jargon — An army director's office — 
"Hope you will see a good show" — "This road is shelled; 
closed to vehicles " — A perfect summer afternoon — The view 
across No Man's Land — Nests of burrowers more cunning than 
any rodents — men — Tranquil preliminaries to an attack — The 
patent curtain of fire — Registering by practice shots — Running 
as men will run only from death — The tall officer who col- 
lapsed — " The shower of death." 

" We had a good show day before yesterday," said 
Brigadier-General Philip Howell, when I went to 
call on him one day. " Sorry you were not here. 
You could have seen it excellently." 

The corps of which he was general staff officer 
had taken a section of first-line trench at Thiepval 
with more prisoners than casualties, which is the 
kind of news they like to hear at General Head- 
quarters. Thiepval was always in the background 
of the army's mind, the symbol of rankling memory 
which irritated British stubbornness and consoled 
the enemy for his defeat of July 15th and his 
gradual loss of the Ridge. The Germans, on the 
defensive, considered that the failure to take 
Thiepval at the beginning of the Somme battle 

292 



A PATENT CURTAIN OF FIRE 293 

proved its impregnability; the British, on the offen- 
sive, considered no place impregnable. 

Faintly visible from the hills around Albert, dis- 
tinctly from the observation post in a high tree, the 
remains of the village looked like a patch of coal 
dust smeared in a fold of the high ground. When 
British fifteen-inch shells made it their target some 
of the dust rose in a great geyser and fell back into 
place ; but there were cellars in Thiepval which even 
fifteen-inch shells could not penetrate. 

" However, we'll make the Germans there form 
the habit of staying indoors," said a gunner. 

Howell who had the Thiepval task in hand I had 
first known at Uskub in Macedonia in the days of 
the Macedonian revolution, when Hilmi Pasha was 
juggling with the Powers of Europe and autonomy 
— days which seem far away. A lieutenant then, 
Howell had an assignment from The Times, while 
home on leave from India, in order to make a study 
of the Balkan situation. In our walks around 
Uskub as we discussed the politics and the armies 
of the world I found that all was grist that came 
to his keen mind. His ideas about soldiering were 
explicit and practical. It was such hard-working, 
observant officers as he, most of them students at 
one time or another at the Staff College, who, 
when the crisis came, as the result of their applica- 
tion in peace time, became the organizers and com- 



294 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

manders of the New Army. The lieutenant I had 
met at Uskub was now, at thirty-eight, the director 
of the tactics of an army corps which was solving 
the problem of reducing the most redoubtable of 
field works. 

Whenever I think of the Staff College I am 
reminded that at the close of the American Civil 
War the commanders of all the armies and most 
of the corps were graduates of West Point, which 
serves to prove that a man of ability with a good 
military education has the start of one who has 
not, though no laws govern geniuses; and if we 
should ever have to fight another great war I look 
for our generals to have studied at Leavenworth 
and when the war ends for the leaders to be men 
whom the public did not know when it began. 

" We shall have another show to-morrow and 
I think that will be a good one, too," said 
Howell. 

All attacks are " shows; " big shows over two or 
three miles or more of front, little shows over a 
thousand yards or so, while five hundred yards is 
merely "cleaning up a trench." It may seem a 
flippant way of speaking, but it is simply the appli- 
cation of jargon to the everyday work of an organi- 
zation. An attack that fails is a " washout," for 
not all attacks succeed. If they did, progress would 
be a matter of marching. 



A PATENT CURTAIN OF FIRE 295 

"Zero is at four; come at two," Howell said 
when I was going. 

At two the next afternoon I found him occupied 
less with final details than with the routine business 
of one who is clearing his desk preparatory to a 
week-end holiday. Against the wall of what had been 
once a bedroom in the house of the leading citizen 
of the town, which was his office, he had an impro- 
vised bookkeeper's desk and on it were the mapped 
plans of the afternoon's operation, which he had 
worked over with the diligence and professional 
earnestness of an architect over his blue prints. 
He had been over the ground and studied it with the 
care of a landscape gardener who is going to make 
improvements. 

" A smoke barrage screen along there," he ex- 
plained, indicating the line of a German trench, 
" but a real attack along here " — which sounded 
familiar from staff officers in chateaux. 

Every detail of the German positions was accu- 
rately outlined, yard by yard, their machine guns 
definitely located. 

" We're uncertain about that one," he remarked, 
laying his pencil on the map symbol for an M. G. 

Trench mortars had another symbol, deep dug- 
outs another. It was the business of somebody to 
get all this information without being communica- 
tive about his methods. Referring to a section of 



296 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

a hundred yards or more he remarked that an eager 
company commander had thought that he could 
take a bit of German trench there and had taken it, 
which meant that the gunners had to be informed 
so as to rearrange the barrage or curtain of fire 
with the resulting necessity of fresh observations 
and fresh registry of practice shots. I judged that 
Howell did not want the men to be too eager; he 
wanted them just eager enough. 

This game being played along the whole front 
has, of course, been likened to chess, with guns and 
men as pieces. I had in mind the dummy actors and 
dummy scenery with which stage managers try out 
their acts, only in this instance there was never any 
rehearsal on the actual stage with the actual scenery 
unless a first attack had failed, as the Germans will 
not permit such liberties except under machine gun 
fire. A call or two came over the telephone about 
some minor details, the principal ones being already 
settled. 

" It's time to go," he said finally. 

The corps commander was downstairs in the din- 
ing-room comfortably smoking his pipe after tea. 
There would be nothing for him to do until news 
of the attack had been received. " I hope you will 
see a good show," he remarked, by way of au 
revoir. 

How earnestly he hoped it there is no use of men- 



A PATENT CURTAIN OF FIRE 297 

tioning here. It is taken for granted. Carefully 
thought out plans backed by hundreds of guns and 
the lives of men at stake — and against the Thiepval 
fortifications ! 

" Yes, we'll make it nicely," concluded Howell, 
as we went down the steps. A man used to motor- 
ing ten miles to catch the nine-thirty to town could 
not have been more certain of the disposal of his 
time than this soldier on the way to an attack. His 
car which was waiting had a right of way up to 
front such as is enjoyed only by the manager of the 
works on his own premises. Of course he paid no 
attention to the sign, " This road is shelled; closed 
to vehicles," at the beginning of a stretch of road 
which looked unused and desolate. 

" A car in front of me here the other day 
received a direct hit from a ' krump,' and car and 
passengers practically disappeared before my eyes," 
he remarked, without further dwelling on the inci- 
dent; for the Germans were, in turn, irritated with 
the insistence of these stubborn British that they 
could take Thiepval. 

Three prisoners in the barbed-wire inclosure that 
we passed looked lonely. They must have been 
picked up in a little bombing affair in a sap. 

" I think that they will have plenty of compan- 
ions this evening," said Howell. " How they will 
enjoy their dinner! " He smiled in recollection as 



298 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

did I of that familiar sight of prisoners eating. 
Nothing excites hunger like a battle or gives such 
zest to appetite as knowledge that you are out of 
danger. I know that it is true and so does every- 
body at the front 

As his car knew no regulations except his wishes 
he might take it as far as it could go without trying 
to cross trenches. I wonder how long it would have 
taken me if I had had a map and asked no ques- 
tions to find my way to the gallery seat which 
Howell had chosen for watching the show. After 
we had passed guns with only one put of ten firing 
leisurely but all with their covers off, the gunners 
near their pieces and ample ammunition at hand, 
we cut straight up the slope, Howell glancing 
at his wrist watch and asking if he were walking too 
fast for me. We dropped into a communication 
trench at a point which experience had proven was 
the right place to begin to take cover. 

" This is a good place," he said at length, and 
we rubbed our helmets with some of the chalk 
lumps of the parapet, which left the black spot of 
our field glasses the only bit of us not in harmony 
with our background. 

It was a perfect afternoon in late summer, with- 
out wind or excessive heat, the blue sky unflecked; 
such an afternoon as you would choose for lolling 
in a hammock and reading a book. The foreground 



A PATENT CURTAIN OF FIRE 299 

was a slope downward to a little valley where the 
usual limbless tree-trunks were standing in a grove 
that had been thoroughly shelled. No one was in 
sight, there, and an occasional German five-point- 
nine shell burst on the mixture of splinters and 
earth. 

On the other side of the valley was a cut in the 
earth, a ditch, the British first-line trench, which was 
unoccupied, so far as I could see. Beyond lay the 
old No Man's Land where grass and weeds had 
grown wild for two seasons, hiding the numerous 
shell-craters and the remains of the dead from the 
British charge of July 1st which had been repulsed. 
On the other side of this was two hundred yards of 
desolate stretch up to the wavy, chalky excavation 
from the deep cutting of the German first-line 
trench, as distinct as a white line on dark-brown 
paper. There was no sign of life here, either, or 
to the rear where ran the network of other excava- 
tions as the result of the almost two years of Ger- 
man digging, the whole thrown in relief on the slope 
up to the bare trunks of two or three trees thrust 
upward from the smudge of the ruins of Thiep- 
val. 

Just a knoll in rolling farm country, that was all; 
but it concealed burrows upon burrows of burrowers 
more cunning than any rodents — men. Since July 
1st the Germans had not been idle. They had had 



3 oo MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

time to profit from the lesson of the attack with 
additions and improvements. They had deepened 
dugouts and joined them by galleries; they had Box 
and Cox hiding-places; nests defensible from all 
sides which became known as Mystery Works and 
Wonder Works. The message of that gashed and 
spaded hillside was one of mortal defiance. 

Occasionally a British high explosive broke in the 
German trench and all up and down the line as far 
as we could see this desultory shell fire was proceed- 
ing, giving no sign of where the next attack was 
coming, which was part of the plan. 

"It's ten to four!" said Howell. "We were 
here in ample time. I hope we get them at relief," 
which was when a battalion that had been on duty 
was relieved by a battalion that had been in rest. 

He laid his map on the parapet and the location 
and plan of the attack became clear as a part of the 
extensive operations in the Thiepval-Mouquet Farm 
sector. The British were turning the flank of these 
Thiepval positions as they swung in from the joint 
of the break of July ist up to the Pozieres Ridge. 
A squeeze here and a squeeze there; an attack on 
that side and then on this; one bite after another. 

" I hope you will like our patent barrage," said 
the artillery general, as he stopped for a moment 
on the way to a near-by observation post. " We are 
thinking rather well of it ourselves of late." He 



A PATENT CURTAIN OF FIRE 301 

did not even have to touch a pushbutton to turn on 
the current. He had set four as zero. 

I am not going to speak of suspense before the 
attack as being in the very air and so forth. I felt 
it personally, but the Germans did not feel it or, at 
least, the British did not want them to feel it. 
There was no more sign of an earthly storm brew- 
ing as one looked at the field than of a thunder- 
storm as one looked at the sky. Perfect soporific 
tranquillity possessed the surroundings except for 
shell-bursts, and their meagerness intensified the 
aspect, strangely enough, on that battlefield where 
I had never seen a quieter afternoon since the 
Somme offensive had begun. One could ask nothing 
better than that the tranquillity should put the Ger- 
mans to sleep. To the staff expert, however, the 
dead world lived without the sight of men. Every 
square rod of ground had some message. 

Of course, I knew what was coming at four 
o'clock, but I was amazed at its power and accuracy 
when it did come — this improved method of artil- 
lery preparation, this patent curtain of fire. An 
outburst of screaming shells overhead that became 
a continuous, roaring sweep like that of a number 
of endless railroad trains in the air signified that 
the guns which had been idle were all speaking. 
Every one by scattered practice shots had registered 
on the German first-line trench at the point where 



302 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

its shell-bursts would form its link in the chain of 
bursts. Over the wavy line of chalk for the front 
of the attack broke the flashes of cracking shrapnel 
jackets, whose bullets were whipping up spurts of 
chalk like spurts of dust on a road from a hailstorm. 

As the gun-blasts began I saw some figures rise 
up back of the German trench. I judged that they 
were the relief coming up or a working party that 
had been under cover. These Germans had to 
make a quick decision: Would they try a leap for 
the dugouts or a leap to the rear? They decided 
on flight. A hundred-yard sprint and they would 
be out of that murderous swath laid so accurately 
on a narrow belt. They ran as men will only run 
from death. No goose-stepping or " after you, 
sir " limited their eagerness. I had to smile at their 
precipitancy and as some dropped it was hard to 
realize that they had fallen from death or wounds. 
They seemed only manikins in a pantomime. 

Then a lone figure stepped up out of a communi- 
cation trench just back of the German first line. 
This tall officer, who could see nothing between 
walls of earth where he was, stood up in full view 
looking around as if taking stock of the situation, 
deciding, perhaps, whether that smoke barrage to 
his right now rolling out of the British trench was 
on the real line of attack or was only for deception; 
observing and concluding what his men, I judge, 



A PATENT CURTAIN OF FIRE 303 

were never to know, for, as a man will when struck 
a hard blow behind the knees, he collapsed suddenly 
and the earth swallowed him up before the bursts 
of shrapnel smoke had become so thick over the 
trench that it formed a curtain. 

There must have been a shell a minute to the 
yard. Shrapnel bullets were hissing into the mouths 
of dugouts ; death was hugging every crevice, saying 
to the Germans : 

" Keep down! Keep out of the rain! If you try 
to get out with a machine gun you will be killed! 
Our infantry is coming! " 



XXIV 

WATCHING A CHARGE 

The British trench comes to life — The line goes forward — A 
modern charge no chance for heroics — Machine-like forward 
movement — The most wicked sound in a battle — The first 
machine gun — A beautiful barrage — The dreaded " shorts " — 
The barrage lifts to the second line — The leap into the trenches 
— Figures in green with hands up — Captured from dugouts — 
A man who made his choice and paid the price — German 
answering fire — Second part of the program — Again the 
protecting barrage — Success — Waves of men advancing behind 
waves of shell fire — Prisoners in good fettle — Brigadier-General 
Philip Howell. 

Now the British trench came to life. What seemed 
like a row of khaki-colored washbasins bottom side 
up and fast to a taut string rose out of the cut in 
the earth on the other side of the valley, and after 
them came the shoulders and bodies of British sol- 
diers who began climbing over the parapet just as 
a man would come up the cellar stairs. This was 
the charge. 

Five minutes the barrage or curtain of fire was 
to last and five minutes was the allotted time for 
these English soldiers to go from theirs to the Ger- 
man trench which they were to take. So many 
paces to the minute was the calculation of their rate 
of progress across that dreadful No Man's Land, 

304 



WATCHING A CHARGE 305 

where machine guns and German curtains of fire 
had wrought death in the preceding charge of 
July 1 st. 

Every detail of the men's equipment was visible 
as their full-length figures appeared on the back- 
ground of the gray-green slope. They were entirely 
exposed to fire from the German trench. Any tyro 
with a rifle on the German parapet could have 
brought down a man with every shot. Yet none 
fell; all were going forward. 

I would watch the line over a hundred yards of 
breadth immediately in front of me, determined not 
to have my attention diverted to other parts of the 
attack and to make the most of this unique oppor- 
tunity of observation in the concrete. 

The average layman conceives of a charge as a 
rush. So it is on the drill-ground, but not where its 
movement is timed to arrival on the second before 
a hissing storm of death, and the attackers must 
not be winded when there is hot work awaiting them 
in close encounters around traverses and at the 
mouths of dugouts. No one was sprinting ahead 
of his companions; no one crying, " Come on, 
boys ! " no one swinging his steel helmet aloft, for 
he needed it for protection from any sudden burst 
of shrapnel. All were advancing at a rapid pace, 
keeping line and intervals except where they had 
to pass around shell-craters. 



306 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

If this charge had none of the display of other days 
it had all the more thrill because of its workman-like 
and regulated progress. No get-drunk-six-day s-of- 
the-week-and-fight-like-h — 1-on-Sunday business of 
the swashbuckling age before Thiepval. Every 
man must do his part as coolly as if he were walk- 
ing a tight rope with no net to catch him, with death 
to be reckoned with in the course of a systematic 
evolution. 

" Very good ! A trifle eager there ! Excellent ! " 
Howell sweeping the field with his glasses was 
speaking in the expert appreciation of a football 
coach watching his team at practice. " No machine 
guns yet," he said for the second time, showing the 
apprehension that was in his mind. 

I, too, had been listening for the staccato of the 
machine gun, which is the most penetrating, me- 
chanical and wicked, to my mind, of all the instru- 
ments of the terrible battle orchestra, as sinister as 
the clicking of a switch which you know will derail 
a passenger train. The men were halfway to the 
German trench, now. Two and a half minutes of 
the allotted five had passed. In my narrow sector 
of vision not one man had yet fallen. They might 
have been in a manoeuver and their goal a deserted 
ditch. Looking right and left my eye ran along the 
line of sturdy, moving backs which seemed less con- 
cerned than the spectator. Not only because you 



WATCHING A CHARGE 307 

were on their side but as the reward of their steadi- 
ness, you wanted them to conquer that stretch of 
first-line fortifications. Any second you expected to 
see the first shell-burst of the answering German 
barrage break in the midst of them. 

Then came the first sharp, metallic note which 
there is no mistaking, audible in the midst of shell- 
screams and gun-crashes, off to the right, chilling 
your heart, quickening your observation with awful 
curiosity and drawing your attention away from the 
men in front as you looked for signs of a machine 
gun's gathering of a human harvest. Rat-tat-tat- 
tat in quick succession, then a pause before another 
series instead of continuous and slower cracks, 
and you knew that it was not a German but a Brit- 
ish machine gun farther away than you had 
thought. 

More than ever you rejoiced in every one of the 
bursts of stored lightning thick as fireflies in the 
blanket of smoke over the German trench, for 
every one meant a shower of bullets to keep down 
enemy machine guns. The French say " Belle! " 
when they see such a barrage, and beautiful is the 
word for it to those men who were going across 
the field toward this shell-made nimbus looking too 
soft in the bright sunlight to have darts of death. 
All the shell-bursts seemed to be in a breadth of 
twenty or thirty yards. How could guns firing at 



308 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

a range of from two to five thousand yards attain 
such accuracy! 

The men were three-quarters of the distance, 
now. As they drew nearer to the barrage another 
apprehension numbed your thought. You feared 
to see a " short " — one of the shells from their own 
guns which did not carry far enough bursting among 
the men — and this, as one English soldier who had 
been knocked over by a short said, with dry humor, 
was " very discouraging, sir, though I suppose it is 
well meant." A terrible thing, that, to the public, 
killing your own men with your own shells. It 
is better to lose a few of them in this way than 
many from German machine guns by lifting the bar- 
rage too soon, but fear of public indignation had its 
influence in the early days of British gunnery. The 
better the gunnery the closer the infantry can go 
and the greater its confidence. A shell that bursts fif- 
teen or twenty yards short means only the slightest 
fault in length of fuse, error of elevation, or fault 
in registry, back where the muzzles are pouring out 
their projectiles from the other side of the slope. 
And there were no shorts that day. Every shell that 
I saw burst was " on." It was perfect gunnery. 

Now it seemed that the men were going straight 
into the blanket over the trenches still cut with 
flashes. Some forward ones who had become eager 
were at the edge of the area of dust-spatters from 



WATCHING A CHARGE 309 

shrapnel bullets in the white chalk. Didn't they 
know that another twenty yards meant death? Was 
their methodical phlegm such that they acted entirely 
by rule ? No, they knew their part. They stopped 
and stood waiting. Others were on the second of 
the five minutes' allowance as suddenly all the 
flashes ceased and nothing remained over the trench 
but the mantle of smoke. The barrage had been 
lifted from the first to the second-line German 
trench as you lift the spray of a hose from one 
flower bed to another. 

This was the moment of action for the men of 
the charge, not one of whom had yet fired a shot. 
Each man was distinctly outlined against the white 
background as, bayonets glistening and hands drawn 
back with bombs ready to throw, they sprang for- 
ward to be at the mouths of the dugouts before the 
Germans came out. Some leaped directly into the 
trench, others ran along the parapet a few steps 
looking for a vantage point or throwing a bomb as 
they went before they descended. It was a quick, 
urgent, hit-and-run sort of business and in an instant 
all were out of sight and the fighting was man to 
man, with the guns of both sides keeping their 
hands off this conflict under ground. The entranced 
gaze for a moment leaving that line of chalk saw 
a second British wave advancing in the same way 
as the first from the British first-line trench. 



3 io MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

" All in along the whole line. Bombing their 
way forward there ! " said Howell, with matter-of- 
fact understanding of the progress of events. 

I blinked tired eyes and once more pressed them 
to the twelve diameters of magnification, every 
diameter having full play in the clear light. I saw 
nothing but little bursts of smoke rising out of the 
black streak in the chalk which was the trench 
itself, each one from an egg of high explosive 
thrown at close quarters but not numerous enough 
to leave any doubt of the result and very evi- 
dently against a few recalcitrants who still held 
out. 

Next, a British soldier appeared on the parapet 
and his attitude was that of one of the military 
police directing traffic at a busy crossroads close to 
the battle front. His part in the carefully worked 
out system was shown when a figure in green came 
out of the trench with hands held up in the 
approved signal of surrender the world over. The 
figure was the first of a file with hands up — 
and very much in earnest in this attitude, too; which 
is the one that the British and the French consider 
most becoming in a German — who were started on 
toward the first-line British trench. All along the 
front small bands of prisoners were appearing in 
the same way. There would have been something 
ridiculous about it, if it had not been so real. 



WATCHING A CHARGE 311 

For the most part, the prisoners had been 
breached from dugouts which had no exit through 
galleries after the Germans had been held fast by 
the barrage. It was either a case of coming out at 
once or being bombed to death in their holes; so 
they came out. 

" A live prisoner would be of more use to his 
fatherland one day than a dead one, even though 
he had no more chance to fight again than a rabbit 
held up by the ears," as one of the German pris- 
oners said. 

" More use to yourself, too," remarked his 
captor. 

" That had occurred to me, also," admitted the 
German. 

During the filing out of the different bags of 
prisoners two incidents passed before my eye with 
a realism that would have been worth a small for- 
tune to a motion picture man if equally dramatic 
ones had not been posed. A German sprang out 
of the trench, evidently either of a mind to resist 
or else in a panic, and dropped behind one of the 
piles of chalk thrown up in the process of excava- 
tion. A British soldier went after him and he held 
up his hands and was dispatched to join one of the 
groups. Another who sought cover in the same way 
was of different temperament, or perhaps resistance 
was inspired by the fact that he had a bomb. He 



3 i2 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

threw it at a British soldier who seemed to dodge 
it and drop on all fours, the bomb bursting behind 
him. Bombs then came from all directions at the 
German. There was no time to parley; he had 
made his choice and must pay the price. He rolled 
over after the smoke had risen from the explosions 
and then remained a still green blot against the 
chalk. A British soldier bent over the figure in a 
hasty examination and then sprang into the trench, 
where evidently he was needed. 

" The Germans are very slow with their shell 
fire," said Howell in the course of his ejaculations, 
as he watched the operations. 

Answering barrages, including a visitation to our 
own position which was completely exposed, were 
in order. Howell himself had been knocked over 
by a shell here during the last attack. One explana- 
tion given later by a German officer for the tardi- 
ness of the German guns was that the staff had 
thought the British too stupid to attack from that 
direction, which pleased Howell as showing 
the advantage of racial reputation as an aid to 
strategy. 

However, the German artillery was not altogether 
unresponsive. It was putting some " krumps " into 
the neighborhood of the British first line and one 
of the bands of prisoners ran into the burst of a 
five-point-nine. Ran is the word, for they were 



WATCHING A CHARGE 313 

going as fast as they could to get beyond their own 
curtain of fire, which experience told them would 
soon be due. I saw this lot submerged in the spout 
of smoke and dust but did not see how many if any 
were hit, as the sound of a machine gun drew my 
attention across the dead grass of the old No Man's 
Land to the German — I should say the former 
German — first-line trench where an Englishman had 
his machine gun on the parados and was sweeping 
the field across to the German second-line trench. 
Perhaps some of the Germans who had run away 
from the barrage at the start had been hiding in 
shell-craters or had shown signs of moving or there 
were targets elsewhere. 

So far so good, as Howell remarked. That sup- 
posedly impregnable German fortification that had 
repulsed the first British attempt had been taken as 
easily as if it were a boy's snow fort, thanks to the 
patent curtain of fire and the skill that had been 
developed by battle lessons. It was retribution for 
the men who had fallen in vain on July 1st. Howell 
was not thinking of that, but of the second objective 
in the afternoon's plan. By this time not more than 
a quarter of an hour had elapsed since the first 
charge had " gone over the lid." Out of the cut 
in the welt of chalk the line of helmets rose 
again and England started across the field to- 
ward the German second-line trench, which was 



3 i4 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

really a part of the main first-line fortification 
on the slope, in the same manner as toward the 
first. 

What about their protecting barrage? My eyes 
had been so intently occupied that my ears had been 
uncommunicative and in a start of glad surprise I 
realized that the same infernal sweep of shells was 
going overhead and farther up on the Ridge fire- 
flies were flashing out of the mantle of smoke that 
blanketed the second line. Now the background 
better absorbed the khaki tint and the figures of the 
men became more and more hazy until they disap- 
peared altogether as the flashes in front of them 
ceased. Howell had to translate from the signals 
results which I could not visually verify. One by 
one items of news appeared in rocket flashes through 
the gathering haze which began to obscure the 
slope itself. 

" I think we have everything that we expected 
to take this afternoon," said Howell, at length. 
11 The Germans are very slow to respond. I think 
we rather took them by surprise." 

They had not even begun shelling their old first 
line, which they ought to have known was now in 
British possession and which they must have had 
registered, as a matter of course; or possibly their 
own intelligence was poor and they had no real 
information of what had been proceeding on the 



WATCHING A CHARGE 315 

slope under the clouds of smoke, or their wires had 
been cut and their messengers killed by shell fire. 
This was certain, that the British in the first-line 
German trench had a choice lot of dugouts in good 
condition for shelter, as the patent barrage does 
not smash in the enemy's homes, only closes the 
doors with curtains of death. 

" I hope you're improving your dugouts," British 
soldiers would call out across No Man's Land, 
"as that is all the better for us when we take 
them!" 

We stayed on till Howell's expert eye had had 
its fill of details, with no burst of shells to interfere 
with our comfort; though by the rules we ought 
to have had a good " strafing," which was another 
reminder of my debt to the German for his con- 
sideration to the American correspondent at the 
British front. 

" What do you think of our patent barrage, 
now? " said the artillery general returning from his 
post of observation. 

" Wonderful ! " was all that one could say. 

" A good show ! " said Howell. 

The rejoicing of both was better expressed in 
their eyes than in words. Good news, too, for the 
corps commander smoking his pipe and waiting, and 
for every battalion engaged — oh, particularly for 
the battalions! 



316 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

" Congratulations ! " The exclamation was passed 
back and forth as we met other officers on our way 
to brigade headquarters in a dugout on the hillside, 
where Howell's felicitations to the happy brigadier 
on the way that his men had gone in were followed 
by suggestions and a discussion about future plans, 
which I left to them while I had a look through the 
brigadier's telescope at Thiepval Ridge under the 
patterns of shell fire of average days, which proved 
that the Germans were making no attempt at a 
counter-attack to recover lost ground. I imag- 
ined that the German staff was dumfounded to 
hear that their redoubtable old first line could 
possibly have been taken with so little fire- 
works. 

It was when I came to the guns on our return 
that I felt an awe which I wanted to translate into 
appreciation. They were firing slowly now or not 
firing at all, and the idle gunners were lounging 
about. They had not seen their own curtain of fire 
or the infantry charge; they had been as detached 
from the action as the crew of a battleship turret. 
It was their accuracy and their coordination with 
the infantry and the infantry's coordination with the 
barrage that had expressed better than volumes of 
reports the possibilities of the offensive with waves 
of men advancing behind waves of shell fire, which 
was applied in the taking of Douaumont later and 



WATCHING A CHARGE 317 

must be the solution of the problem of a decision 
on the Western front. 

Above the communication trenches the steel hel- 
mets of the British and the gray fatigue caps of Ger- 
man prisoners were bobbing toward the rear and at 
the casualty clearing station the doctor said, " Very 
light!" in answer to the question about losses. 
The prisoners were in unusually good fettle even 
for men safe out of shell fire; many had no chalk 
on their clothes to indicate a struggle. They had 
been sitting in their dugouts and walked out when 
an Englishman appeared at the door. Yes, they 
said that they had been caught just before relief, 
and the relief had been carried out in an unexpected 
fashion. If they must be taken they, too, liked the 
patent barrage. 

" I'll let you know when there's to be another 
show," said Howell, as we parted at corps head- 
quarters; but none could ever surpass this one in 
its success or its opportunity of intimate observa- 
tion. 

This was the last time I saw him. A few days 
later, on one of his tours to study the ground for 
an attack, he was killed by a shell. Army custom 
permits the mention of his name because he is dead. 
He was a steadfast friend, an able soldier, an 
upright, kindly, high-minded gentleman; and when 
I was asked, not by the lady who had never kept 



318 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

up her interest so long in anything as in this war, 
but by another, if living at the front is a big strain, 
the answer is in the word that comes that a man 
whom you have just seen in the fulness of life and 
strength is gone. 



XXV 

CANADA IS STUBBORN 

What is Canada fighting for? — The Kaiser has brought Canadians 
together — The land of immense distances — Canada's unfaltering 
spirit — Canada our nearest neighbor geographically and senti- 
mentally — Ypres salient mud — Canadians invented the trench 
raid — A wrestling fight in the mud — Germans " try it on " 
the Canadians — " The limit " in artillery fire — Maple Leaf 
spirit — Baseball talk on the firing line — A good sprinkling of 
Americans. 

One day the Canadians were to lift their feet out 
of the mire of the Ypres salient and take the high, 
dry road to the Somme front, and anyone with a 
whit of chivalry in his soul would have rejoiced to 
know that they were to have their part in the big 
movement of Sept. 15th. But let us consider other 
things and other fighting before we come to the tak- 
ing of Courcelette. 

When I was home in the winter of 19 15-16, for 
the first time the border between the United States 
and Canada drew a line in sharp contrasts. The 
newspapers in Canada had their casualty lists, 
parents were giving their sons and wives their hus- 
bands to go three thousand miles to endure hard- 
ship and risk death for a cause which to them had 
no qualifications of a philosophic internationalism. 

319 



320 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

Everything was distinct. Sacrifice and fortitude, 
life and death, and the simple meaning words were 
masters of the vocabulary. 

Some people might ask why Canada should be 
pouring out her blood in Europe ; what had Flanders 
to do with her? England was fighting to save her 
island, France for the sanctity of her soil, but what 
was Canada fighting for? As I understood it, she 
was fighting for Canada. A blow had been struck 
against her, though it was struck across the Atlantic, 
and across the Atlantic she was going to strike back. 

She had had no great formative war. Parde- 
burg was a kind of expedition of brave men, like the 
taking of San Juan Hill. It did not sink deep into 
the consciousness of the average Canadian, who 
knew only that some neighbor of his had been in 
South Africa. Our own formative war was the 
Revolution, not the Civil War where brother fought 
brother. The Revolution made a mold which, 
perhaps, instead of being impressed upon succeed- 
ing generations of immigrants may have only given 
a veneer to them. A war may be necessary to make 
them molten for another shaping. 

No country wanted war less than Canada, but 
when war came its flame made Canada molten with 
Canadian patriotism. As George III. brought the 
Carolinas and Massachusetts together, so the 
Kaiser has brought the Canadian provinces together. 



CANADA IS STUBBORN 321 

The men from that cultivated, rolling country of 
Southern Ontario, from New Brunswick and the 
plains and the coast and a quota from the neat 
farms of Quebec have met face to face, not on rail- 
road trains, not through representatives in Parlia- 
ment or in convention, but in billets and trenches. 
Whatever Canada is, she is not small. She is 
particularly the land of immense distances; her 
breadth is greater than that of the United States. 
All of the great territorial expanse of Canada in its 
manhood, in the thoughts of those at home, was 
centered in a few square miles of Flanders. 

I was in Canada when only the first division had 
had its trial and recruiting was at full blast; and 
again when three hundred and fifty thousand had 
joined the colors and Canada, now feeling the full 
measure of loss of life, seemed unfaltering, which 
was the more remarkable in a new country where 
livelihood is easy to gain and Opportunity knocks 
at the door of youth if he has only the energy to 
take her by the hand and go her way. I may add 
that not all the youth about Toronto or any other 
town who gave as their reason for not enlisting that 
they were American citizens actually were. They 
were not " too proud to fight," whatever other 
reason they had, for they had no pride; and if hon- 
est Quakers they would not have given a lying 
excuse. 



322 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

Out in France I heard talk about this Canadian 
brigade being better than that one, and that an 
Eastern Canada man wanted no leading from a 
Western Canada man, and that not all who were 
winning military crosses were hardy frontiersmen 
but some were lawyers and clerks in Montreal or 
Toronto — or should I put Toronto first, or perhaps 
Ottawa or Winnipeg — and more talk expressive of 
the rivalry which generals say is good for spirit of 
corps. Moose Jaw Street was across from Halifax 
Avenue and Vancouver Road from Hamilton Place 
in the same community. 

As I was not connected with any part of Canada, 
the Canadians, with their Maple Leaf emblem, were 
all Canadians to me; men across the border which 
we pass in coming and going without change of lan- 
guage or steam-heated cars or iced-water tanks. 
Some Canadians think that the United States with 
its more than a hundred millions may feel patroniz- 
ing toward their eight millions, when after Cource- 
lette if a Canadian had patronized the United 
States I should not have felt offended. I have even 
heard some fools say that the two countries might 
yet go to war, which shows how absurd some men 
have to be in order to attract attention. All of this 
way of thinking on both sides should be placed on 
a raft in the middle of Lake Erie and supplied with 
bombs to fight it out among themselves under a cur- 



CANADA IS STUBBORN 323 

tain of fire ; and their relatives ought to feel a deep 
relief after the excursion steamers that came from 
Toronto, Cleveland and Buffalo to see the show had 
returned home. 

To listen to certain narrators you might think 
that it was the Allies who always got the worst of 
it in the Ypres salient, but the German did not like 
the salient any better than they. I never met any- 
body who did like it. German prisoners said that 
German soldiers regarded it as a sentence of death 
to be sent to the salient. There are many kinds of 
mud and then there is Ypres salient mud, which is 
all kinds together with a Belgian admixture. I 
sometimes thought that the hellish outbreaks by both 
sides in this region were due to the reason which 
might have made Job run amuck if all the temper 
he had stored up should have broken out in a 
storm. 

This is certain, that the Canadians took their 
share in the buffets in the mud, not through any staff 
calculation but partly through German favoritism 
and the workings of German psychology. Consider 
that the first volunteer troops to be put in the battle 
line in France weeks before any of Kitchener's 
Army was the first Canadian division, in answer to 
its own request for action, which is sufficient sol- 
dierly tribute of a commander to Canadian valor! 
That proud first division, after it had been well 



324 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

mud-soaked and had its hand in, was caught in the 
gas attack. It refused to yield when it was only 
human to yield, and stood resolute in the fumes 
between the Germans and success and even counter- 
attacked. Moreover, it was Canadians who intro- 
duced the trench raid. 

If the Canadians did not particularly love the Ger- 
mans, do you see any reason why the Germans 
should love the Canadians? It was unpleasant to 
suffer repulse by troops from an unmilitary, new 
country. Besides, German psychology reasoned 
that if Canadians at the front were made to suffer 
heavy losses the men at home would be discouraged 
from enlisting. Why not? What had Canada to 
gain by coming to fight in France? It does not 
appear an illogical hypothesis until you know the 
Canadians. 

However, it must not be understood that other 
battalions, brigades and divisions, English and 
Scotch, did not suffer as heavily as the Canadians. 
They did; and do not forget that in the area which 
has seen the hardest, bloodiest, meanest, nastiest, 
ghastliest fighting in the history of the world the 
Germans, too, have had their full share of losses. 
The truth is that if any normal man was stuck in 
the mud of the Ypres salient and another wanted 
his place he would say, " Take it! I'm only trying 
to get out ! We've got equally bad morasses in the 



CANADA IS STUBBORN 325' 

Upper Yukon; " and retire to a hill and set up a 
machine gun. 

When a Canadian officer was asked if he had 
organized some trenches that his battalion had taken 
his reply, " How can you organize pea soup? " filled 
a long-felt want in expression to characterize the 
nature of trench-making in that kind of terrain. 
Yet in that sea of slimy and infected mush men 
have fought for the possession of cubic feet of the 
mixture as if it had the qualities of Balm of 
Gilead — which was also logical. What appears 
most illogical to the outsider is sometimes most 
logical in war. It was a fight for mastery, 
and mastery is the first step in a war of frontal 
positions. 

Many lessons the Canadians had to learn about 
organization and staff work, about details of disci- 
pline which make for homogeneity of action, and the 
divisions that came to join the first one learned 
their lessons in the Ypres salient school, which gave 
hard but lasting tuition. I was away when at St. 
Eloi they were put to such tests as only the salient 
can provide. The time was winter, when chill water 
filled the shell-craters and the soil oozed out of 
sandbags and the mist was a cold, wet poultice. 
Men bred to a dry climate had to fight in a climate 
better suited to the Englishman or the German than 
to the Canadian. There could be no dugouts. Lift 



326 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

a spade of earth below the earth level and it became 
a puddle. It was a wrestling fight in the mud, this, 
holding onto shell-craters and the soft remains of 
trenches. The Germans had heard that the Cana- 
dians were highstrung, nervous, quick for the offen- 
sive, but badly organized and poor at sticking. 
The Canadians proved that they could be stubborn 
and that their soldiers, even if they had not had the 
directing system of an army staff that had prepared 
for forty years, with two years of experience could 
act on their own in resisting as well as in attack- 
ing. "Our men! our men!" the officers would 
say. That was it: Canada's men, learning tactics 
in face of German tactics and holding their 
own! 

When all was peaceable up and down the line, 
with the Grand Offensive a month away, the Ger- 
mans once more " tried it on " the Canadians in 
the Hooge and Mount Sorrell sector, where the 
positions were all in favor of the Germans with 
room to plant two guns to one around the bulging 
British line. For many days they had been quietly 
registering as they massed their artillery for their 
last serious effort during the season of 19 16 in the 
north. 

Anything done to the Canadians always came 
close home to me ; and news of this attack and of its 
ferocity to anyone knowing the positions was bound 



CANADA IS STUBBORN 327 

to carry apprehension, lasting only until we learned 
that the Canadians were already counter-attacking, 
which set your pulse tingling and little joy-bells 
ringing in your head. It meant, too, that the Ger- 
mans could not have developed any offensive that 
would be serious to the situation as a whole at that 
moment, in the midst of preparations for the 
Somme. Nothing could be seen of the fight, even 
had one known that it was coming, in that flat 
region where everyone has to follow a communica- 
tion trench with only the sky directly overhead 
visible. 

There was an epic quality in the story of what 
happened as you heard it from the survivors. It 
was an average quiet morning in the first-line 
trenches when the German hurricane broke from 
all sides; but first-line trenches is not the right 
phrase, for all the protection that could be made 
was layers of sandbags laboriously filled and piled 
to a thickness sufficient to stop a bullet at short 
range. 

What luxury in security were the dugouts of the 
Somme hills compared to the protection that could 
be provided here ! When the first series of bursts 
announced the storm you could not descend a flight 
of steps to a cavern whose roof was impenetrable 
even by five-hundred-pound shells. Little houses 
of sandbags with corrugated tin roofs, in some 



328 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

instances level with the earth, which any direct hit 
could " do in " were the best that generous army 
resources could permit. High explosive shells must 
turn such breastworks into rags and heaps of earth. 
There was nothing to shoot at if a man tried to stick 
to the parapet, for fresh troops fully equipped for 
their task back in the German trenches waited on 
demolition of the Canadian breastworks before 
advancing under their own barrage. Shrapnel sent 
down its showers, while the trench walls were 
opened in great gaps and tossed heavenward. 
Officers clambered about in the midst of the spouts 
of dust and smoke over the piles and around the 
craters, trying to keep in touch with their men, when 
it was a case of every man taking what cover he 
could. 

"The limit! " as the men said. "The absolute 
limit in an artillery concentration ! " 

But they did not go — not until they had orders. 
This was their kind of discipline under fire; they 
" stayed on the job." One group charged out 
beyond the swath of fire to meet the Germans in 
the open and there fought to the death in expres- 
sion of characteristic initiative. When word was 
passed to retire, some grudgingly held on to fight 
the outnumbering Germans in the midst of the 
debris and escaped only by passing through the Ger- 
man barrage placed between the first and second line 



CANADA IS STUBBORN 329 

to cover the German advance on the second. The 
supports themselves under the carefully arranged 
pattern of shell lire held as the rallying-points 
of the survivors, who found the communication 
trenches so badly broken that it was as well to keep 
in the open. Little knots of men with their defenses 
crushed held from the instinctive sense of individual 
stubbornness. 

To tell the whole story of that day as of many 
other days where a few battalions were engaged, 
giving its fair due to each group in the struggle, is 
not for a correspondent who had to cover the length 
of the battle line and sees the whole as an example 
of Maple Leaf spirit. The rest is for battalion 
historians, who will find themselves puzzled about 
an action where there was little range of vision and 
this obscured by shell-smoke and the preoccupation 
of each man trying to keep cover and do his own 
part to the death. 

In the farmhouses afterward, as groups of 
officers tried to assemble their experiences, I had the 
feeling of being in touch with the proof of all that 
I had seen in Canada months previously. Losses 
had been heavy for the battalions engaged though 
not for the Canadian corps as a whole, no heavier 
than British battalions or the Germans had suffered 
in the salient. Canada happened to get the blow 
this time. 



330 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

The men, after a night's sleep and writing home 
that they were safe and how comrades had died, 
might wander about the roads or make holiday 
as they chose. They were not casual about the 
fight, but outspoken and frank, Canadian fashion. 
They realized what they had been through and 
spoke of their luck in having survived. From the 
fields came the cry of, " Leave that to me ! " as a 
fly rose from the bat, or, " Out on first! " as men 
took a rest from shell-curves and high explosives 
with baseball curves and hot liners between the 
bases, which was very homelike there in Flanders. 
Which of the players was American one could not 
tell by voice or looks, for the climate along the 
border makes a type of complexion and even of 
features with the second generation which is readily 
distinguished from the English type. 

"What part of Canada do you come from?" 
asked an officer of a private. 

" Out west, sir! " 

" What part of the west? " 

" 'Way out west, sir ! " 

" An officer is asking you. Be definite." 

" Well, the State of Washington, sir." 

There was a good sprinkling of Americans in the 
battle, including officers; but on the baseball field 
and the battlefield they were a part of the whole, 
performing their task in a way that left no doubt 



CANADA IS STUBBORN 331 

of their quality. Whether the spirit of adventure 
or the principle at stake had brought her battalions 
to Flanders, Canada had proved that she could be 
stubborn. She was to have her chance to prove that 
she could be quick. 



XXVI 

THE TANKS ARRIVE 

The New Army Irish — Irish wit — And Irish courage — Pompous 
Prussian Guard officer — The British Guards and their char- 
acteristics — Who invented the tank? — The great secret — Com- 
bination of an armadillo, a caterpillar, a diplodocus, a motor 
car and a traveling circus — Something really new on the 
front — Gas attacks — A tank in the road — A moving " strong 
point" — Making an army laugh — Suspense for the inmates of 
the untried tanks. 

The situation on the Ridge was where we left it in 
a previous chapter with all except a few parts of it 
held, enough for a jumping-off place at all points 
for the sweep down into the valley toward Bapaume. 
In the grim preliminary business of piecemeal gains 
which should make possible an operation over a six- 
mile front on Sept. 15th, which was the first gen- 
eral attack since July 14th, the part that the Irish 
battalions played deserves notice, where possibly 
the action of the tried and sturdy English regiments 
on their flanks need not be mentioned, as being char- 
acteristic of the work they had been doing for 
months. 

They were the New Army Irish, all volunteers, 
men who had enlisted to fight against Germany when 
their countrymen were largely disaffected, which 

332 



THE TANKS ARRIVE 333 

requires more initiative than to join the colors when 
it is the universal passion of the community. Many 
stories were told of this Irish division. If there 
are ten Irishmen among a hundred soldiers the 
stories have a way of being about the ten Irish- 
men. 

I like that one of the Connaught man who, on 
his first day in the trenches, was set to digging out 
the dirt that had been filled into a trench by a 
shell-burst. Along came another shell before he 
was half through his task; the burst of a second 
knocked him over and doubled the quantity of earth 
before him. When he picked himself up he 
went to the captain and threw down his spade, 
saying: 

" Captain, I can't finish that job without help. 
They're gaining on me ! " 

Some people thought that the Sinn Fein move- 
ment which had lately broken out in the Dublin riots 
would make the new Irish battalions lukewarm in 
any action. They would go in but without putting 
spirit into their attack. Other skeptics questioned 
if the Irish temperament which was well suited to 
dashing charges would adapt itself to the matter- 
of-fact necessities of the Somme fighting. Their 
commander, however, had no doubts ; and the army 
had none when the test was made. 

Through Guillemont, that wicked resort of ma- 



334 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

chine guns, which had been as severely hammered 
by shell fire after it had repulsed British attacks as 
any village on the Somme, the Irish swept in good 
order, cleaning up dugouts and taking prisoners on 
the way with all the skill of veterans and a full 
relish of the exploit, and then forward, as a well- 
linked part of a successful battle line, to the sunken 
road which was the second objective. 

" I thought we were to take a village, Captain," 
said one of the men, after they were established in 
the sunken road. " What are we stopping here 
for?" 

" We have taken it. You passed through it — 
that grimy patch yonder " — which was Guillemont's 
streets and houses mixed in ruins five hundred yards 
to the rear. 

"You're sure, Captain?" 

"Quite!" 

" Well, then, I'd not like to be the drunken man 
that tried to find his keyhole in that town ! " 

It was a pity, perhaps, that the Irish who 
assisted in the taking of Ginchy, which completed 
the needful mastery of the Ridge for British pur- 
poses, could not have taken part in the drive that 
was to follow. We had looked forward to this 
drive as the reward of a down hill run after the 
patient labor of wrenching our way up hill. Even 
the Germans, who had suffered appalling losses in 



THE TANKS ARRIVE 335 

trying to hold the Ridge, must have been relieved 
that they no longer had to fight against the 
inevitable. 

Again the clans were gathering and again there 
ran through the army the anticipation which came 
from the preparation for a great blow. The 
Canadians were appearing in billets back of the 
front. If in no other way, I should have known of 
their presence by their habit of moving about roads 
and fields getting acquainted with their surround- 
ings and finding out if apples were ripe. For other 
portions of the country it was a little unfair that 
these generous and well-paid spenders should take 
the place of the opulent Australians in villages 
where small boys already had hordes of pennies and 
shopkeepers were hastening to replenish their stocks 
to be equal to their opportunities. 

At last the Guards, too, were to have their turn, 
but not to go in against the Prussian Guard, which 
those with a sense of histrionic fitness desired. 
When a Prussian Guard officer had been taken at 
Contalmaison he had said, " The Prussian Guard 
feels that it is surrendering to a foe worthy of its 
steel when it yields to superior numbers of the Eng- 
lish Guard! " or words to that effect according to 
reports, only to receive the answer that his captors 
were English factory hands and the like of the New 
Army, whose officers excused themselves, in the cir- 



336 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

cumstances, for their identity as politely as they 
could. 

Grenadiers, Coldstreams, Scottish, or Irish, the 
Guards were the Guards, England's crack regi- 
ments, the officers of each wearing their buttons in 
a distinctive way and the tall privates saluting with 
the distinctive Guards' salute. In the Guards the 
old spirit of gaiety in face of danger survived. 
Their officers out in shell-craters under curtains of 
fire joked one another with an aristocratic, genial 
sangfroid, the slender man who had a nine-inch 
crater boasting of his luck over the thick-set man 
who tried to accommodate himself to a live-inch, 
while a colonel blew his hunting-horn in the charge, 
which the Guards made in a manner worthy of 
tradition. 

Though the English would have been glad to go 
against the Prussian Guard with bayonet or bomb 
or a free-for-all, army commanders in these days 
are not signaling to the enemy, " Let us have a go 
between your Guards and our Guards ! " but are 
putting crack regiments and line regiments in a 
battle line to a common task, where the only cri- 
terion is success. 

The presence of the Guards, however, yielded 
interest to another new arrival on the Somme 
front. When the plan for a style of armored 
motor car which would cross shell-craters and 



THE TANKS ARRIVE 337 

trenches was laid before an eminent general at the 
War Office, what he wrote in dismissing it from 
further consideration might have been more blas- 
phemous if he could have spared the time to be 
anything but satirically brief. Such conservatives 
probably have prevented many improvements from 
materializing, and probably they have also saved 
the world from many futile creations which would 
only have wasted time and material. 

Happily both for geniuses and fools, who all, in 
the long run, let us hope, receive their just deserts, 
there is no downing an idea in a free country where 
continued knocking at doors and waiting in hallways 
eventually secure it a trial. Then, if it succeeds, 
the fellow who thought that the conception was 
original with him finds his claims disputed from all 
points of the compass. If it fails, the poor thing 
goes to a fatherless grave. 

I should like to say that I was the originator of 
the tank — one of the originators. In generous 
mood, I am willing to share honors with rivals too 
numerous to mention. Haven't I also looked across 
No Man's Land toward the enemy's parapet? 
Whoever has must have conjectured about a machine 
that would take frontal positions with less loss of 
life than is usual and would solve the problem of 
breaking the solid line of the Western front. The 
possibility has haunted every general, every soldier, 



338 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

Some sort of armadillo or caterpillar which would 
resist bullet fire was the most obvious suggestion, 
but when practical construction was considered, the 
dreamer was brought down from the empyrean, 
where the aeroplane is at home, to the forge and 
the lathe, where grimy machinists are the pilots of 
a matter-of-fact world. Application was the thing. 
I found myself so poor at it that I did not even pass 
on my plan to the staff, which had already consid- 
ered a few thousand plans. Ericsson conceiving a 
gun in a revolving turret was not so great a man 
as Ericsson making the monitor a practicable engine 
of war. 

To Lieutenant-Colonel Swinton, of the Engineers, 
was given the task of transforming blue-print plans 
into reality. There was no certainty that he would 
succeed, but the War Office, when it had need for 
every foundry and every skilled finger in the land, 
was enterprising enough to give him a chance. He 
and thousands of workmen spent months at this 
most secret business. If one German spy had access 
to one workman, then the Germans might know 
what was coming. Nobody since Ericsson had a 
busier time than Swinton without telling anybody 
what he was doing. The whisperers knew that 
some diabolical surprise was under way and they 
would whisper about it. No censor regulations can 
reach them. Sometimes the tribe was given false 



THE TANKS ARRIVE 339 

information in great confidence in order to keep it 
too occupied to pass on the true. 

The new monster was called a tank because it was 
not like a tank; yet it seemed to me as much like 
a tank as like anything else. As a tank is a 
receptacle for a liquid, it was a name that ought to 
mask a new type of armored motor car as success- 
fully as any name could. Flower pot would have 
been too wide of the mark. A tank might carry 
a new kind of gas or a burning liquid to cook or 
frizzle the adversary. 

Considering the size of the beast, concealment 
seemed about as difficult as for a suburban cottager 
to keep the fact that he had an elephant on the 
premises from his next-door neighbor; but the 
British Army has become so used to slipping ships 
across the channel in face of submarine danger that 
nobody is surprised at anything that appears at the 
front unheralded. 

One day the curtain rose, and the finished product 
of all the experiments and testing appeared at the 
British front. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers 
were now in the secret. " Have you seen the 
tanks?" was the question up and down the line. 
All editors were inventing their own type of tank. 
Though I have patted one on the shoulder in a 
familiar way, as I might stroke the family cat, it 
neither kicked nor bit me. Though I have been 



340 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

inside of one, I am not supposed to know at this 
writing anything about its construction. Unques- 
tionably the tank resembles an armadillo, a cater- 
pillar, a diplodocus, a motor car, and a traveling 
circus. It has more feet than a caterpillar, and 
they have steel toenails which take it over the 
ground; its hide is more resistant than an arma- 
dillo's, and its beauty of form would make the 
diplodocus jealous. No pianist was ever more tem- 
peramental; no tortoise ever more phlegmatic. 

In summer heat, when dust clouds hung thick on 
the roads behind the shell clouds of the fields, when 
the ceaseless battle had been going on for two 
months and a half, the soldiers had their interest 
stimulated by a mechanical novelty just before a 
general attack. Two years of war had cumulatively 
desensitized them to thrills. New batteries moving 
into position were only so many more guns. Fresh 
battalions marching to the front were only more 
infantry, all of the same pattern, equipped in the 
same way, moving with the same fixed step. Ma- 
chine gun rattles had become as commonplace as 
the sound of creaking caisson wheels. Gas shells, 
lachrymatory shells and Flammenwerfer were as 
old-fashioned as high explosives and shrapnel. 
Bombing encounters in saps had no variation. The 
ruins of the village taken to-day could not be told 
from the one taken yesterday except by its location 



THE TANKS ARRIVE 341 

on the map. Even the aeroplanes had not lately 
developed any sensational departures from habit. 
One paid little more attention to them than a gondo- 
lier pays to the pigeons of St. Mark's. Curtains of 
fire all looked alike. There was no new way of 
being killed — nothing to break the ghastly monotony 
of charges and counter-charges. 

All the brains of Europe had been busy for two 
years inventing new forms of destruction, yet no 
genius had found any sinuous creature that would 
creep into dugouts with a sting for which there was 
no antidote. Everybody was engaged in killing, yet 
nobody was able to " kill to his satisfaction," as the 
Kentucky colonel said. The reliable methods were 
the same as of old and as I have mentioned else- 
where : projectiles propelled by powder, whether 
from long-necked naval guns at twenty thousand 
yards, or short-necked howitzers at five thousand 
yards, or rifles and machine guns at twenty-five 
hundred yards, or trench mortars coughing balls of 
explosives for one thousand yards. 

True, the gas attack at Ypres had been an innova- 
tion. It was not a discovery; merely an application 
of ghastliness which had been considered too hor- 
rible for use. As a surprise it had been successful 
— once. The defense answered with gas masks, 
which made it still more important that soldiers 
should not be absent-minded and leave any of their 



342 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

kit out of reach. The same amount of energy put 
into projectiles would have caused more casualties. 
Meanwhile, no staff of any army, making its elabo- 
rate plans in the use of proved weapons, could be 
certain that the enemy had not under way, in this 
age of invention which has given us the wireless, 
some new weapon which would be irresistible. 

Was the tank this revolutionary wonder? Its 
sponsors had no such hope. England went on build- 
ing guns and pouring out shells, cartridges and 
bombs. At best, the tanks were another application 
of an old, established form of killing in vogue 
with both Daniel Boone and Napoleon's army — 
bullets. 

The first time that I saw a tank, the way that the 
monster was blocking a road gorged with transport 
had something of the ludicrousness of, say, a pliocene 
monster weighing fifty tons which had nonchalantly 
lain down at Piccadilly Circus when the traffic was 
densest. Only the motor-truck drivers and bat- 
talions which were halted some distance away 
minded the delay. Those near by were sufficiently 
entertained by the spectacle which stopped them. 
They gathered around the tank and gaped and 
grinned. 

The tank's driver was a brown-skinned, dark- 
haired Englishman, with a face of oriental stolidity. 
Questions were shot at him, but he would not even 



THE TANKS ARRIVE 343 

say whether his beast would stand without hitching 
or not; whether it lived on hay, talcum powder, 
or the stuff that bombs are made of; or what was 
the nature of its inwards, or which was the head 
and which the tail, or if when it seemed to be back- 
ing it was really going forward. 

By the confession of some white lettering on its 
body, it was officially one of His Majesty's land 
ships. It no more occurred to anyone to suggest 
that it move on and clear the road than to argue 
with a bulldog which confronts you on a path. I 
imagined that the feelings of the young officer who 
was its skipper must have been much the same as 
those of a man acting as his own chauffeur and hav- 
ing a breakdown on a holiday in a section of town 
where the population was as dense as it was curious 
in the early days of motoring. For months he had 
been living a cloistered life to keep his friends from 
knowing what he was doing, as he worked to 
master the eccentricities of his untried steed, his 
life and the lives of his crew depending upon this 
mastery. Now he had stepped from behind the cur- 
tain of military secrecy into the full blaze of star- 
ing, inquiring publicity. 

The tank's inclination was entirely reptilian. 
Its body hugged the earth in order to expose as 
little surface as possible to the enemy's fire; it was 
mottled like a toad in patches of coloring to add to 



344 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

its low visibility, and there was no more hop in it 
than in the Gila monster. 

The reason of its being was obvious. Its hide 
being proof against the bullets of machine guns and 
rifles, it was a moving " strong point " which 
could go against the enemy's fixed strong points, 
where machine guns were emplaced to mow down 
infantry charges, with its own machine guns. Only 
now it gave no sign of moving. As a mechanical 
product it was no more remarkable than a steam 
shovel. The wonder was in the part that it was 
about to play. A steam shovel is a labor-saving, 
and this a soldier-saving, device. 

. For the moment it seemed a leviathan dead 
weight in the path of traffic. If it could not move 
of itself, the only way for traffic to pass was to 
build a road around it. Then there was a rum- 
bling noise within its body which sounded like some 
unnatural gasoline engine, and it hitched itself 
around with the ponderosity of a canal boat being 
warped into a dock and proceeded on its journey 
to take its appointed place in the battle line. 

Did the Germans know that the tanks were build- 
ing? I think that they had some inkling a few 
weeks before the tanks' appearance that something 
of the sort was under construction. There was a 
report, too, of a German tank which was not ready 
in time to meet the British. Some German pris- 



THE TANKS ARRIVE 345 

oners said that their first intimation of this new 
affliction was when the tanks appeared out of the 
morning mist, bearing down on the trenches; others 
said that German sausage observation balloons had 
seen something resembling giant turtles moving 
across the fields up to the British lines and had 
given warning to the infantry to be on the lookout. 

Thus, something new had come into the war, 
deepening the thrill of curiosity and intensifying the 
suspense before an attack. The world, its appetite 
for novelty fed by the press, wanted to know all 
about the tanks; but instead of the expected 
mechanical details, censorship would permit only 
vague references to the tanks' habits and psychology, 
and the tanks were really strong on psychology — 
subjectively and objectively. It was the objective 
result in psychology that counted: the effect on the 
fighting men. Human imagination immediately 
characterized them as living things ; monstrous com- 
rades of infantry in attack. 

Blessed is the man, machine, or incident that will 
make any army laugh after over two months of bat- 
tle. Individuals were always laughing over inci- 
dents ; but here hundreds of thousands of men were 
to see a new style of animal perform elephantine 
tricks. The price of admission to the theater was 
the risk of a charge in their company, and the 
prospect gave increased zest to battalions taking 



346 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

their place for next day's action. What would hap- 
pen to the tanks? What would they do to the 
Germans? 

The staff, which had carefully calculated their 
uses and limitations, had no thought that the tanks 
would go to Berlin. They were simply a n?w aux- 
iliary. Probably the average soldier was skeptical 
of their efficiency; but his skepticism did not inter- 
fere with his curiosity. He wanted to see the beast 
in action. 

Christopher Columbus crossing uncharted seas 
did not undertake a more daring journey than the 
skippers of the tanks. The cavalryman who 
charges the enemy's guns in an impulse knows only 
a few minutes of suspense. A torpedo destroyer 
bent on coming within torpedo range in face of 
blasts from a cruiser's guns, the aviator closing in 
on an enemy's plane, have the delirium of purpose 
excited by speed. But the tanks are not rapid. 
They are ponderous and relatively slow. Columbus 
had already been to sea in ships. The aviator and 
the commander of a destroyer know their steeds 
and have precedent to go by, while the skippers 
of the tanks had none. They went forth with 
a new kind of ship on a new kind of sea, whose 
waves were shell-craters, whose tempests sudden 
concentrations of shell fire. 

The Germans might have full knowledge of the 



THE TANKS ARRIVE 347 

ships' character and await their appearance with 
forms of destruction adapted to the purpose. All 
was speculation and uncertainty. Officers and crew 
were sealed up in a steel box* the sport of destiny. 
For months they had been preparing for this day, 
the crowning experiment and test, and all seemed of 
a type carefully chosen for their part, soldiers who 
had turned land sailors, cool and phlegmatic like 
the monsters which they directed. Each one hav- 
ing given himself up to fate, the rest was easy in 
these days of war's superexaltation, which makes 
men appear perfectly normal when death hovers 
near. Not one would have changed places with any 
infantryman. Already they had esprit de corps. 
They belonged to an exclusive set of warriors. 

Lumberingly dipping in and out of shell-craters, 
which sometimes half concealed the tanks like ships 
in a choppy sea, rumbling and wrenching, they 
appeared out of the morning mist in face of the 
Germans who put up their heads and began work- 
ing their machine guns after the usual artillery 
curtain of fire had lifted. 



XXVII 

THE TANKS IN ACTION 

How the tanks attacked — A tank walking up the main street of a 
village — Effect on the Germans — Prussian colonel surrenders to 
a tank — Tanks against trees — The tank in High Wood — The 
famous Creme de Menthe — Demolishing a sugar factory — Ger- 
mans take the tanks seriously — Differences of opinion regarding 
tanks — Wandering tanks — German attack on a stranded tank — 
Prehistoric turtles — Saving twenty-five thousand casualties. 

With the reverse slope of the Ridge to conceal 
their approach to the battle line, the tanks squat- 
ting among the men at regular intervals over a six- 
mile front awaiting the cue of zero for the 
attack at dawn and the mist still holding to cover 
both tanks and men, the great Somme stage was set 
in a manner worthy of the debut of the new 
monsters. 

A tactical system of coordinated action had been 
worked out for the infantry and the untried aux- 
iliary, which only experienced soldiers could have 
applied with success. According to the nature of 
the positions in front, the tanks were set definite 
objectives or left to find their own objectives. They 
might move on located machine gun positions or 
answer a hurry call for help from the infantry. 

348 



THE TANKS IN ACTION 349 

Ahead of them was a belt of open field between 
them and the villages whose capture was to be the 
consummation of the day's work. While observers 
were straining their eyes to follow the progress of 
the tanks and seeing but little, corps headquarters 
eagerly awaited news of the most picturesque experi- 
ment of the war, which might prove ridiculous, or 
be a wonderful success, or simply come up to expecta- 
tions. 

No more thrilling message was ever brought by 
an aeroplane than that which said that a tank was 
" walking " up the main street of Flers surrounded 
by cheering British soldiers, who were in possession 
of the village. " Walking " was the word officially 
given ; and very much walking, indeed, the tank must 
have seemed to the aviator in his swift flight. An 
eagle looked down on a tortoise which had a ser- 
pent's sting. This tank, having attended to its 
work on the way, passed on through Flers bearing 
a sign: "Extra Special! Great Hun Victory!" 
Beyond Flers it found itself alongside a battery of 
German field guns and blazed bullets into the 
amazed and helpless gunners. 

The enemy may have heard of the tanks, but 
meeting them was a different matter. After he had 
fought shells, bullets, bombs, grenades, mortars, 
bayonets and gas, the tank was the straw that broke 
the camel's back of many a German. A steel 



350 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

armadillo laying its bulk across a trench and sweep- 
ing it on both sides with machine guns brought the 
familiar complaint that this was not fighting accord- 
ing to rules in a war which ceased to have rules 
after the bombing of civilian populations, the sink- 
ing of the Lusitania, and the gas attack at Ypres. 
It depends on whose ox is gored. There is a lot 
of difference between seeing the enemy slaughtered 
by some new device and being slaughtered by one 
yourself. No wonder that German prisoners who 
had escaped alive from a trench filled with dead, 
when they saw a tank on the road as they passed to 
the rear threw up their hands with a guttural: 
" Mein Gott! There is another! There is no fight- 
ing that! This is not war; it is butchery! " Yes, 
it was butchery — and butchery is war these days. 
Wasn't it so always? And as a British officer re- 
marked to the protestants: 

" The tank is entirely in keeping with Hague 
rules, being only armor, machinery and machine 
guns." 

Germans surrendered to a tank in bodies after 
they saw the hopelessness of turning their own 
machine gun and rifle fire upon that steel hide. 
Why not? Nothing takes the fight out of anyone 
like finding that his blows go into the air and the 
other fellow's go home. There seemed a strange 
loss of dignity when a Prussian colonel delivered 



THE TANKS IN ACTION 351 

himself to a tank, which took him on board and 
eventually handed him over to an infantry guard; 
but the skipper of the tank enjoyed it if the colonel 
did not, 

The surprising thing was how few casualties 
there were among the crews of the tanks, who went 
out prepared to die and found themselves safe in 
their armored shells after the day's fight was over, 
whether their ships had gone across a line of Ger- 
man trenches, developed engine trouble, or tempo- 
rarily foundered in shell-holes. Bullets had merely 
made steel-bright flecks on the tanks' paint and 
shrapnel had equally failed to penetrate the 
armor. 

Among the imaginary tributes paid to the tank's 
powers is that it " eats " trees— that is to say, it 
can cut its way through a wood — and that it can 
knock down a stone wall. As it has no teeth it can- 
hot masticate timber. All that it accomplishes must 
be done by ramming or by lifting up its weight to 
crush an obstacle. A small tree or a weak wall 
yields before its mass. 

As foresters, the tanks had a stiff task in High 
Wood, where the Germans had held to the upper 
corner with their nests of machine guns which the 
preliminary bombardment of British artillery had 
not silenced and they began their murderous song 
immediately the British charge started. They com- 



352 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

manded the front and the flanks if the men continued 
to advance and therefore might make a break in 
the whole movement, which was precisely the object 
of the desperate resistance that had preserved this 
strong point at any cost against the rushes of British 
bombers, trench mortars and artillery shells for two 
months. 

Soldiers are not expected to undertake the impos- 
sible. Nobody who is sane will leap into a furnace 
with a cup of water to put out the fire. Only a 
battalion commander who is a fool will refuse, in 
face of concentrated machine gun fire, to stop the 
charge. 

" Leave it to me ! " was the unspoken message 
communicated to the infantry by the sight of that 
careening, dipping, clambering, steel body as it 
rumbled toward the miniature fortress. And the 
infantry, as it saw the tank's machine guns blazing, 
left it to the tank, and, working its way to the 
right, kept in touch with the general line of attack, 
confident that no enemy would be left behind to fire 
into their backs. Thus, a handful of men capable, 
with their bullet sprays, of holding up a thousand 
men found the tables turned on them by another 
handful manning a tank. They were simply " done 
in," as the tank officer put it. Safe behind his 
armor, he had them no less at his mercy than a 
submarine has a merchant ship. Even if unarmed, 



THE TANKS IN ACTION 353 

a tank could take care of an isolated machine gun 
position by sitting on it. 

One of the most famous tanks was Creme de 
Menthe. She had a good press agent and also made 
good. She seemed to like sugar. At least, her 
glorious exploit was in a sugar factory, a huge build- 
ing of brick with a tall brick chimney which had 
been brought down by shell fire. Underneath the 
whole were immense dugouts still intact where Ger- 
man machine gunners lay low, like Br'er Rabbit, 
as usual, while the shells of the artillery prep- 
aration were falling, and came out to turn 
on the bullet spray as the British infantry ap- 
proached. British do the same against German 
attacks; only in the battle of the Somme the British 
had been always attacking, always taking machine 
gun positions. 

Creme de Menthe, chosen comrade of the Cana- 
dians on their way to the taking of Courcelette, was 
also at home among debris. The Canadians saw 
that she was as she moved toward it with the glee 
of a sea lion toward a school of fish. She did not 
go dodging warily, peering around corners with a 
view to seeing the enemy before she was seen. 
Whatever else a tank is, it is not a crafty boy scout. 
It is brazenly and nonchalantly public in its meth- 
ods, like a steam roller coming down the street into 
a parade without regard to the rules of the road, 



354 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

Externally it is not temperamental. It does not 
bother to follow the driveway or mind the " Keep 
Off the Grass " sign when it goes up to the entrance 
of a dugout. 

And Creme de Menthe took the sugar factory and 
a lot of prisoners. "Why not?" as one of the 
Canadians said. " Who wouldn't surrender when 
a beast of that kind came up to the door? It was 
enough to make a man who had drunk only light 
Munich beer wonder if he had * got 'em ! ' " 

Prisoners were a good deal of bother to the 
tanks. Perhaps future tanks will be provided 
with pockets for carrying prisoners. But the 
future of tanks is wrapped in mystery at the 
present. 

This is not taking them seriously, you may say. 
In that case, I am only reflecting the feelings of the 
army. Even if the tanks had taken Bapaume or 
gone to the Kaiser's headquarters, the army would 
have laughed at them. It was the Germans who 
took the tanks seriously; and the more seriously the 
Germans took the tanks the more the British 
laughed. 

" Of all the double-dyed, ridiculous things, was 
the way that Creme de Menthe person took the 
sugar factory!" said a Canadian, who broke into 
a roar at the recollection of the monster's antics. 
" Good old girl, Creme de Menthe ! Ought to 



THE TANKS IN ACTION 355 

retire her for life and let her sit up on her haunches 
in a cafe and sip her favorite tipple out of barrel 
with a garden hose for a straw — which would 
be about her size." 

However, there was a variation of opinions 
among soldiers about tanks drawn from personal 
experience, when life and death form opinions, of 
the way it had acted as an auxiliary to their part 
of the line. A tank that conquered machine-gun 
positions and enfiladed trenches was an heroic com- 
rade surrounded by a saga of glorious anecdotes. 
One which became stalled and failed in its enter- 
prise called for satirical comment which was applied 
to all. 

We did not personify machine guns, or those mon- 
strous, gloomy, big howitzers with their gaping 
maws, or other weapons ; but every man in the army 
personified the tanks. Two or three tanks, I should 
have remarked, did start for Berlin, without wait- 
ing for the infantry. The temptation was strong. 
All they had to do was to keep on moving. When 
Germans scuttling for cover were the only thing 
that the skippers could see, they realized that they 
were in the wrong pew, or, in strictly military lan- 
gauge, that they had got beyond their " tactical ob- 
jective." 

Having left most of their ammunition where they 
thought that it would do the most good in the 



356 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

German lines, these wanderers hitched themselves 
around and waddled back to their own people. For 
a tank is an auxiliary, not an army, or an army staff, 
or a curtain of fire, and must cooperate with the 
infantry or it may be in the enemy's lines to stay. 
There was one tank which found itself out of gaso- 
line and surrounded by Germans. It could move 
neither way, but could still work its guns. Marooned 
on a hostile shore, it would have to yield when the 
crew ran out of food. 

The Germans charged the beast, and got under 
its guns, pounded at the door, tried to bomb and 
pry it open with bayonets and crawled over the 
top looking for dents in the armor with the rage 
of hornets, but in vain. They could not harm 
the crew inside and the crew could not harm 
them. 

"A noisy lot!" said the tank's skipper. 

Tactical objective be — British soldiers went to 
the rescue of their tank. Secure inside their shell, 
the commander and crew awaited the result of the 
fight. After the Germans were driven away, some- 
one went for a can of gasoline, which gave the beast 
the breath of life to retreat to its " correct tactical 
position." 

Even if it had not been recovered at the time, the 
British would have regained possession with their 
next advance ; for the Germans had no way of taking 



THE TANKS IN ACTION 357 

a tank to the rear. There are no tractors powerful 
enough to draw one across the shell-craters. It can 
be moved only by its own power, and with its 
engine out of order it becomes a fixture on the 
landscape. Stranded tanks have an appearance of 
Brobdingnagian helplessness. They are fair targets 
for revenge by a concentration of German artillery 
fire; yet when half hidden in a gigantic shell-hole 
which they could not navigate they are a small 
target and, their tint melting into the earth, are 
hard to locate. 

Seen through the glasses, disregarding ordinary 
roads and traveled routes, the tanks' slatey backs 
seemed like prehistoric turtles whose natural habitat 
is shell-mauled earth. They were the last word in 
the business of modern war, symbolic of its satire 
and the old strife between projectile and armor, 
offensive and defensive. If two tanks were to meet 
in a duel, would they try to ram each other after 
ineffectually rapping each other with their machine 
guns? 

"I hope that it knows where it is going! " ex- 
claimed a brigadier-general, as he watched one ap- 
proach his dugout across an abandoned trench, 
leaning over a little as it dipped into the edge of a 
shell-crater some fifteen feet in diameter with its 
sureness of footing on a rainy day when a pedestrian 
slipped at every step. 



358 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

There was no indication of any guiding human 
intelligence, let alone human hand, directing it; and, 
so far as one could tell, it might have mistaken the 
general's underground quarters for a storage sta- 
tion where it could assuage its thirst for gasoline 
or a blacksmith's shop where it could have a bent 
steel claw straightened. When, finally, it stopped 
at his threshold, the general expressed his relief 
that it had not tried to come down the steps. A 
door like that of a battleship turret opened, and out 
of the cramped interior where space for crew and 
machinery is so nicely calculated came the skipper, 
who saluted and reported that his ship awaited 
orders for the next cruise. 

Soon the sight of tanks became part of the routine 
of existence, and interest in watching an advance 
centered on the infantry which they supported in a 
charge; for only by its action could you judge 
whether or not machine gun fire had developed and, 
later, whether or not the tanks were silencing it. The 
human element was still supreme, its movement and 
its losses in life the criterion of success and failure, 
with an eternal thrill that no machine can arouse. 
If the tanks had accomplished nothing more than 
they did in the two great September attacks they 
would have been well worth while. I think that 
they saved twenty-five thousand casualties, which 
would have been the additional cost of gaining the 



THE TANKS IN ACTION 359 

ground won by unassisted infantry action. When 
machines manned by a few men can take the place 
of many battalions in this fashion they exemplify 
the essential principle of doing the enemy a maximum 
of damage with a minimum to your own forces. 



XXVIII 

CANADA IS QUICK 

Canada's first offensive — The "surprise party" — Over nasty 
ground — Canada's hour — Germans amazed — Business of the 
Canadians to " get there " — Two difficult villages — Canadians 
make new rules — Canada's green soldiers accomplish an 
unheard of feat — Attacking on their nerve — The last burst — 
Fewer Canadians than Germans, but — " Mopping up " — Round- 
ing up the captives — An aristocratic German and a democratic 
Canadian — French-Canadians — Thirteen counter-attacks beaten 
— Quickness and adaptability — Canada's soldiers make good. 

The tanks having received their theatric due, we 
come to other results of Sept. 14th when the re- 
sistance of the right was stiff and Canada had her 
turn of fortune in sharing in the brilliant success on 
the left. 

It was the Canadians' first offensive. They knew 
that the eyes of the army were upon them. Not 
only for themselves, after parrying blows through- 
out their experience at the front, but in the name of 
other battalions that had endured the remorseless 
grind of the Ypres salient they were to strike the 
blows of retribution. The answer as to how they 
would charge was written in faces clear-cut by the 
same climate that gave them their nervous alert- 
ness. 

360 



CANADA IS QUICK 361 

On that ugly part of the Ridge where no stable 
trench could be made under the vengeful German 
artillery fire and small numbers were shrewdly dis- 
tributed in shell-craters and such small ditches as 
could be maintained, they crept out in the darkness 
a few days before the attack to " take over " from 
the Australians and familiarize themselves with 
this tempest-torn farming land which still heaved 
under tornadoes of shells. The men from the far- 
away island continent had provided the jumping- 
off place and the men from this side of the Pacific 
and the equator were to do the jumping, which 
meant a kind of overseas monopoly of Pozieres 
Ridge. 

The Germans still hated the idea of yielding all 
the crest that stared down on them and hid the 
slope beyond which had once been theirs. They 
would try again to recover some of it, but chose a 
time for their effort which was proof enough that 
they did not know that a general attack was coming. 
Just before dawn, with zero at dawn, when the 
Canadians were forming on the reverse slope for 
their charge, the Germans laden with bombs made 
theirs and secured a footing in the thin front line 
among the shell-craters and, grim shadows in the 
night lighted by bursts of bombs and shells, strug- 
gled as they have on many similar occasions. 

Then came the " surprise party." Not far away 



362 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

the Canadian charge waited on the tick of the sec- 
ond which was to release the six-mile line of infantry 
and the tanks. 

" We were certainly keyed up," as one of the 
men said. " It was up to us all right, now." 

Breasting the tape in their readiness for the 
word, the dry air of North America with its 
champagne exhilaration was in their lungs whipping 
their red corpuscles. They had but one thought 
and that was to " get there." No smooth drill- 
ground for that charge, but earth broken with shell- 
craters as thick as holes in a pepper-box cover ! A 
man might stumble into one, but he must get up and 
go on. One fellow who twisted his ankle found it 
swollen out of all shapre when the charge was over. 
If he had given it such a turn at home he would 
not have attempted to move but would have 
called for a cab or assistance. Under the spell 
of action he did not even know that he was 
hurt. 

It was Canada's hour; all the months of drill at 
home, all the dreams on board the transport of 
charges to come, all the dull monotony of billets, 
all the slimy vigil of trenches, all the labor of 
preparation come to a head for every individual. 
Such was the impulse of the tidal wave which broke 
over the crest upon the astounded Germans who 
had gained a footing in the trench, engulfing them 



CANADA IS QUICK 363 

in as dramatic an episode as ever occurred on the 
Somme front. 

"Give yourselves up and be quick about it! 
We've business elsewhere ! " said the officers. 

Yes, they had business with the German first- 
line trench when the artillery curtain lifted, where 
few Germans were found, most of them having been 
in the charge. The survivors here put up their 
hands before they put up their heads from shelter 
and soon were on their way back to the rear in the 
company of the others. 

" I guess we had the first batch of prisoners to 
reach an inclosure on the morning of the 14th," 
said one Canadian. " We had a start with some 
coming into our own front line to be captured." 

On the left Mouquet Farm, which, with its unsur- 
passed dugouts and warrens surrounded by isolated 
machine gun posts, had repulsed previous attacks, 
could not resist the determined onslaught which will 
share glory, when history is written, with the storm- 
ing of Courcelette. Down hill beside the Bapaume 
Road swept the right and center, with shell-craters 
still thick but growing fewer as the wave came 
out into .open fields in face of the ruins of the sugar 
factory, with the tank Creme de Menthe ready to 
do her part. She did not take care of all the 
machine guns ; the infantry attended to at least one, 
I know. The German artillery turned on curtains of 



364 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

fire, but in one case the Canadians were not there 
when the curtain was laid to bar their path. They 
had been too rapid for the Germans. No matter 
what obstacle the Germans put in the way the busi- 
ness of the Canadians was to " get there " — and 
they " got there." The line marked on their map 
from the Bapaume Road to the east of the sugar 
factory as their objective was theirs. In front of 
them was the village of Courcelette and in front 
of the British line linked up on their right was 
Martinpuich. 

Spades now! Dig as hard as you have charged 
in order to hold the freshly won position, with 
" there " become " here " and the Ridge at your 
backs! The London song of " The Byng Boys are 
Here," which gave the name of the Byng Boys to 
the Canadians after General Byng took command 
of their corps, had a most realistic application. 

With the news from the right of the six-mile 
front that of a continuing fierce struggle, word 
from the left had the definite note of success. Was 
General Byng pleased with his Byng Boys? Was 
his superior, the army commander, pleased with the 
Canadians? They had done the trick and this is 
the thing that counts on such occasions; but when 
you take trenches and fields, however great the gain 
of ground, they lack the concrete symbol of victory 
which a village possesses. 



CANADA IS QUICK 365 

And ahead were Courcelette and Martinpuich, 
both only partially demolished by shell fire and in 
nowise properly softened according to the usual 
requirements for capitulation, with their cellars 
doubtless heavily reinforced as dugouts. Officers 
studying the villages through their glasses believed 
that they could be taken. Why not try? To try 
required nerve, when it was against all tactical ex- 
perience to rush on to a new objective over such a 
broad front without taking time for elaborate artil- 
lery preparation. General Byng, who believed in 
his men and understood their initiative, their " get 
there " quality, was ready to advance and so was 
the corps commander of the British in front of 
Martinpuich. Sir Douglas Haig gave consent. 

" Up and at them ! " then, with fresh battalions 
hurried up so rapidly that they had hardly time to 
deploy, but answering the order for action with the 
spirit of men who have been stalled in trenches and 
liked the new experience of stretching their legs. 
With a taste of victory, nothing could stop these 
highstrung reserves, except the things that kill and 
wound. The first charge had succeeded and the 
second must succeed. 

German guns had done the customary thing by 
laying barrages back of the new line across the field 
and shelling the crest of the Ridge to prevent sup- 
ports from coming up. It was quite correct form 



366 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

for the German commander to consider the cere- 
mony of the day over. The enemy had taken his 
objective. Of course, he would not try for another 
immediately. Meanwhile, his tenure of new line 
must be made as costly as possible. But this time 
the enemy did not act according to rules. He made 
some new ones. 

The reserve battalions which were to undertake 
the storming of the village had gone over the 
ground under the barrages and were up to the first 
objective, and when through the new line occupied 
by the men who made the first charge they could 
begin their own charge. As barrages are intermit- 
tent, one commander had his men lie down behind 
one until it had ceased. Again, after waiting on 
another for a while he decided that he might be 
late in keeping his engagement in Courcelette and 
gave the order to go through, which, as one soldier 
said, " we did in a hundred-yard dash sprinting a 
double quick — good reason why! " When the fresh 
wave passed the fellows in the new line the winners 
of the first objective called, " Go to it! " " You'll 
do it! " " Hurrah for Canada ! " and added touches 
of characteristic dry humor which shell fire makes 
a little drier, such as a request to engage seats for 
the theatre at Courcelette that evening. 

Consider that these battalions which were to take 
Courcelette had to march about two miles under 



CANADA IS QUICK 367 

shell fire, part of the way over ground that was 
spongy earth cut by shell-craters, before they could 
begin their charge and that they were undertaking 
an innovation in tactics, and you have only half an 
understanding of their task. Their officers were 
men out of civil life in every kind of occupation, 
learning their war in the Ypres salient stalemate, 
and now they were to have the severest possible 
test in directing their units in an advance. 

There had been no time to lay out pattern plans 
for each company's course in this second rush ac- 
cording to map details, which is so important 
against modern defenses. The officers did not know 
where machine guns were hidden; they were uncer- 
tain of the strength of the enemy who had had all 
day to prepare for the onslaught on his bastions 
in the village. It was pitched battle conditions 
against set defenses. Under curtains of fire, with 
the concentration heavy at one point and weak at 
another, with machine gun or sniping fire develop- 
ing in some areas, with the smoke and the noise, 
with trenches to cross, the business of keeping a 
wave of men in line of attack for a long distance 
— difficult enough in a manoeuver — was possible 
only when the initiative and an understanding of 
the necessities of the situation exist in the soldiers 
themselves. If one part of the line was not up, 
if a section was being buffeted by salvos of shells, 



368 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

the officers had to meet the emergency; and officers 
as well as men were falling, companies being left 
with a single officer or with only a " non-com " in 
charge. Unless a man was down he knew that his 
business was to " get there " and his direction was 
straight ahead in line with the men on his right 
and left. 

With dead and wounded scattered over the field 
behind them, all who could stand on their feet, 
including officers and men knocked over and buried 
by shells and with wounds of arms and heads and 
even legs which made them hobble, reached the 
edge of the village on time and lay down to await 
the lifting of the fire of their own guns before the 
final rush. 

After charging such a distance and paying the toll 
of casualties exacted they enjoyed a breathing space, 
a few minutes in which to steady their thoughts for 
the big thing before, " lean for the hunt," they 
sprang up to be in for the fray with the burst of 
the last shells from their guns. They knew what 
to do. It had been drilled into them; they had 
talked it and dreamed it in billets when routine 
became humdrum, these men with practical minds 
who understood the essentials of their task. 

There were fewer Canadians charging through 
the streets than there were Germans in the village 
at that moment. The Canadians did not know it, 



CANADA IS QUICK 369 

but if they had it would have made no difference, 
such was their spirit. Secure in their dugouts from 
bombardment, the first that the Germans, in their 
systematized confidence that the enemy would not 
try for a second objective that day, knew of the 
presence of the Canadians was when the attackers 
were at the door and a St. Lawrence River incisive- 
ness was calling on the occupants to come out as they 
were prisoners — which proves the advantage of 
being quick. The second wave was left to " mop 
up " while the first wave passed on through the 
village to nail down the prize by digging new 
trenches. Thus, they had their second objective, 
though on the left of the line where the action had 
been against a part of the old first-line system 
of trenches progress had been slow and fighting 
bitter. 

The Canadians who had to " mop up " had the 
" time of their lives " and some ticklish moments. 
What a scene ! Germans in clean uniforms coming 
out of their dugouts blinking in surprise at their 
undoing and in disgust, resentment and suppressed 
rage ! Canadians, dust-covered from shell-bursts, 
eyes flashing, laughing, rushing about on the job in 
the midst of shouts of congratulation and directions 
to prisoners among the ruins, and the German com- 
mander so angered by the loss of the village that 
he began pouring in shells on Germans and Cana- 



370 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

dians at the same time ! Two colonels were among 
the captured, a regimental and a battalion com- 
mander. The senior was a baron — one cannot 
leave him out of any narrative — and inclined to 
bear himself with patrician contempt toward the 
Canadian democracy, which is a mistake for barons 
in his situation with every Canadian more or less 
of a king that day. When he tried to start his men 
into a revolt his hosts acted promptly, with the 
result that the uprising was nipped in the bud and 
the baron was shot through the leg, leaving him 
still " fractious and patronizing." Then the little 
colonel of the French- Canadians said, " I think I 
might as well shoot you in a more vital part and 
have done with it! " or something equally to the 
point and suddenly the baron became quite demo- 
cratic himself. 

One of the battalions that took Courcelette was 
French-Canadian. No other Canadian battalion 
will deny them the glory that they won that day, 
and it must have been irritating to the German 
baron to surrender superior numbers to the stocky 
type that we see in New England factory towns and 
on their farms in Quebec, for they now formed the 
battalion, the frontiersmen, the courrier de bois, 
having been mostly killed in the salient. Shall I 
forget that little private, forty years old if he were 
a day, with a hole from shrapnel in his steel helmet 



CANADA IS QUICK 371 

and the bit of purple and white ribbon worn proudly 
on his breast, who, when I asked him how he felt 
after he received the clout from a shell-fragment, 
remarked blandly that it had knocked him down 
and made his head ache ! 

" You have the military cross! " I said. 

" Yais, sir. I'm going to win the Victoria 
Cross ! " he replied, saluting. Talk about " the 
spirit that quickeneth ! " 

Or, shall I forget the French-Canadian colonel 
telling his story of how he and the battalion on his 
left in equal difficulties held the line beyond Cource- 
lette with his scattered men against thirteen counter- 
attacks that night; how he had to go from point to 
point establishing his posts in the dark, and his 
repeated "'I golly!" of wonder at how he had 
managed to hold on, with its ring of naive unreali- 
zation of the humor of being knocked over by a 
shell and finding, " 'I golly! " that he had not been 
hurt! They had not enlisted freely, the French- 
Canadians, but those who had proved that if the 
war emotion had taken hold of them as it had of 
the rest of Canada they would not have been found 
wanting. 

11 'I golly! " they had to fight from the very fact 
that there were only a few to strike for old France 
and for the martial honor of Quebec. And they 
held all they took as sturdily as the other Canadian 



372 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

battalion in front of the village when the Germans 
awakened to revenge for the loss of Courcelette. 

From start to finish of that great day it had been 
quickness that counted; quickness to realize oppor- 
tunities; alertness of individual action in " mopping 
up" after the village was taken; prompt adapta- 
bility to situations which is the gift of the men of 
a new country; and that individual confidence of 
the Canadian once he was not tied to a trench and 
might let his initiative have full play, man to man, 
which is not a thing of drill or training but of 
inheritance and environment. On the right, Mar- 
tinpuich was taken by the British and also held. 

It was in rain and mist after the battle, while the 
dead still lay on the field, that I went over the Ridge 
and along the path of the Canadian charges, won- 
dering how they had passed through the curtains 
of fire when I saw shrapnel cases so thick that you 
could step from one to another; wondering how 
men could survive in the shell-craters and the poor, 
tumbled trenches in the soft, shell-mashed earth; 
wondering at the whole business of their being here 
in France, a veteran army two years after the war 
had begun. I saw them dripping from the rains, 
mud-spattered, but in the joy of having made good 
when their turn came, and in a way that was an 
exemplification of Canadian character in every de- 
tail. " Heap good ! " I suppose that big Sioux 



CANADA IS QUICK 373 

Indian, looking as natural seated in a trench in his 
imperturbability as if he were seated in front of his 
tepee, would have put it. He was seeing a strange 
business, but high explosives shaking the earth, 
aeroplanes overhead, machine guns rattling in the 
war of the Pale Faces he accepted without emotion. 
With the second battle of Ypres, with St. Eloi, 
Hooge, Mount Sorrell, and Observatory Ridge, 
Courcelette had completed the cycle of soldierly 
experiences for those who bore the Maple Leaf in 
France of the Fleur-de-lis. Officers and men of every 
walk of life called to a new occupation, a democracy 
out of the west submitting to discipline had been 
inured and trained to a new life of risk and com- 
radeship and sacrifice for a cause. It will seem 
strange to be out of khaki and to go to the office, 
or the store, or to get up to milk the cows at dawn; 
" but," as one man said, " we'll manage to adapt 
ourselves to it without spending nights in a mud 
hole or asking the neighbors to throw any bombs 
over the fence in order to make the change 
gradual." 



XXIX 

THE HARVEST OF VILLAGES 

High and low visibilities — Low Visibility a pro-German — 
High Visibility and his harvest smile — Thirty villages taken 
by the British — The 25th of September — The Road of the 
Entente — Twelve miles of artillery fire — Two villages taken — 
Combles — British and French meet in a captured village — 
English stubbornness — Dugouts holding a thousand men — Cap- 
ture of Thiepval. 

Always we were talking of the two visibilities, high 
and low. I thought of them as brothers with the 
same meteorological parent, one a good and the 
other an evil genius. Every morning we looked 
out of doors to see which had the stage. Thus, we 
might know whether or not the " zero " of an attack 
set for to-day would be postponed, as it was usually 
if the sun gave no sign of appearing, though not 
always; sometimes the staff gave those who tried 
to guess what was in its mind a surprise. 

Low Visibility, a pro-German who was in his 
element in the Ypres salient in midwinter, delighted 
in rain, mist, fog and thick summer haze — anything 
that prevented observers from seeing the burst of 
shells, transformed shell-craters into miniature lakes 
and fields into mire to founder charges, and stalled 
guns. 

374 



THE HARVEST OF VILLAGES 375 

High Visibility was as merry as his wicked 
brother was dour. He sent the sunlight streaming 
into your room in the morning, washed the air of 
particles enabling observers to see shell-bursts at 
long range, and favored successful charges under 
accurate curtains of fire — the patron saint of all 
modern artillery work, who would be most at home 
in Arizona where you could carry on an offensive 
the year around. 

During September his was a glad harvest smile 
which revealed figures on the chalk welts a mile 
away as clearly as if within a stone's throw under 
the glasses and limned the tree-trunks of ruined vil- 
lages in sharp outlines. He was your companion 
now when you might walk up the Ridge and, stand- 
ing among shell-craters still as a frozen sea where 
but lately an inferno had raged, look out across the 
fields toward new lines of shell fire and newly won 
villages on lower levels. He helped to make the 
month of September when he was most needed the 
most successful month of the offensive, with its sec- 
ond great attack on the 25th turning the table of 
losses entirely against the Germans and bringing 
many guests to the prisoners' inclosures. 

These were days that were rich with results, days 
of harvest, indeed, when the ceaseless fighting on 
the Ridge and the iron resolution of a commander 
had its reward; when advances gathered in vil- 



376 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

lages till the British had taken thirty and the French, 
with fresh efforts after their own chipping away at 
strong points, also had jumping-off places for 
longer drives as they swung in with their right on 
the Somme in combination with British attacks. 

The two armies advanced as one on the 25th. 
The scene recalled the splendor of the storming of 
Contalmaison which, if not for its waste and 
horror, might lead men to go to war for the glory 
of the panorama — glorious to the observer in this 
instance when he thought only of the spectacle, in 
a moment of oblivion to the hard work of prepara- 
tion and the savage work of execution. Our route 
to a point of observation for the attack which was 
at midday took us along the Road of the Entente, 
as I called it, where French battalions marched with 
British battalions, stately British motor trucks 
mixed with the lighter French vehicles, and Gaul 
sat resting on one side of the road and Briton on 
the other as German prisoners went by, and there 
was a mingling of blue and khaki which are both 
of low visibility against the landscape yet as distinct 
as the characters of the two races, each with its own 
way of fighting true to racial bent yet accomplish- 
ing its purpose. 

Just under the slope where we sat the British guns 
linked up with the French. To the northward the 
British were visible right away past Ginchy and 



THE HARVEST OF VILLAGES 377 

Guillemont to Flers and the French clear to the 
Somme. We were almost midway of a twelve-mile 
stretch of row upon row of flashes of many calibers, 
the French more distinct at the foot of a slope fear- 
lessly in the open like the British, a long machine- 
loom of gunnery with some monsters far back send- 
ing up great clouds of black smoke from Mt. St. 
Quentin which hid our view of Peronne. 

Now it was all together for the guns in the pre- 
liminary whirlwind, with soixante-quinzes ahead 
sparkling up and down like the flashes of an auto- 
matic electric sign, making a great, thrumming beat 
of sound in the valley, and the i2o's near by doing 
their best, too, with their wicked crashes, while the 
ridges beyond were a bobbing canopy of looming, 
curling smoke. The units of the two armies might 
have been wired to a single switchboard with heart- 
beats under blue and khaki jackets timed together 
in the final expression of entente cordiale become 
entente furieuse. 

The sunlight had the golden kindness of Septem- 
ber and good Brother High Visibility seemed to 
make it a personal matter to-day against the Kaiser. 
Distinct were the moving figures of the gunners and 
bright was the gleam of the empty shells dropping 
out of the breach of the soixante-quinze as the bar- 
rel swung back in place and of the loaded shells 
going home; distinct were paths and trenches and 



378 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

all the detail of the tired, worn landscape, with 
the old trenches where we were sitting tumbling in 
and their sides fringed with wild grass and weeds, 
which was Nature's own little say in the affair and 
a warning that in a few years after the war she 
and the peasant will have erased war's landmarks. 
The lifting of the barrage as the infantry went in 
was signaled to the eye when the canopy of shell- 
smoke began to grow thin and gossamery for want 
of fresh bursts and another was forming beyond, 
as if the master hand at such things had lifted a 
long trail of cloud from one set of crests to another ; 
only, nature never does things with such mathe- 
matical precision. All in due order to keep its turn 
in the program the German artillery began to reply 
according to its system of distribution, with guns 
and ammunition plentiful but inferior in quantity to 
the French. They did not like that stretch of five 
hundred yards behind a slope where they thought 
that the most troublesome batteries were, and the 
puffs of shrapnel smoke thickened dimming the 
flashes from the bursting jackets until a wall of mist 
hung there. A torrent of five-point-nines was tear- 
ing up fresh craters with high explosives back of 
other gun positions, and between the columns of 
smoke we saw the French gunners going on uncon- 
cerned by this plowing of the landscape which was 
not disturbing them. 



THE HARVEST OF VILLAGES 379 

Far off on the plain where a British ammunition 
train was visible the German loosed more anger, 
whipping the fields into geysers; but the caissons 
moved on as if this were a signal of all aboard for 
the next station without the Germans being aware 
that their target was gone. A British battery ad- 
vancing at another point evidently was not in view 
of the Germans two thousand yards away, though 
good Brother High Visibility gave our glasses the 
outline of the horses at five thousand yards. 

Thus, you watched to see what the Germans were 
shooting at, with suspense at one point and at 
another the joy of the observer who sees the one 
who is " it " in blind man's buff missing his quarry. 
Some shrapnel searching a road in front and a 
scream overhead indicated a parcel of high explo- 
sives for a village at the rear. In Morval where 
houses were still standing, their white walls visible 
through the glasses, there was a kind of flash which 
was not that of a shell but prolonged, like a window- 
pane flaming under the sun, which we knew meant 
that the village was taken, as was also Gueudecourt 
we learned afterward. 

Reserves were filing along a road between the 
tiers of guns, helmets on the backs of heads French 
fashion when there is no fire, with the easy march- 
ing stride of the French and figures disappeared 
and reappeared on the slope as they advanced. 



3 8o MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

Wounded were coming along the winding gray 
streak of highway near where we sat and a convoy 
of prisoners passed led by a French guard whose 
attitude seemed to have an eye-twinkling of " See 
who's here and see what I've got! " Not far away 
was a French private at a telephone. 

"It goes well!" he said. " Rancourt is taken 
and we are advancing on Fregicourt. Combles is 
a ripe plum." 

All the while Combles had been an oasis in the 
shell fire, the one place that had immunity, although 
it had almost as much significance in the imagina- 
tion of the French people as Thiepval in that of 
the English. They looked forward to its storming 
as a set dramatic event and to its fall as one of the 
turning-points in the campaign. Often a position 
which was tactically of little importance, to our con- 
ception, would become the center of great expecta- 
tions to the outside world, while the conquest of a 
strong point with its nests of machine guns pro- 
duced no responsive thrill. 

Combles was a village and a large village, its size 
perhaps accounting for the importance associated 
with it when it had almost none in a military sense. 
Yet correspondents knew that readers at the break- 
fast table would be hungry for details about Com- 
bles, where the taking of the Schwaben Redoubt 
or Regina Trench, which were defended savagely, 



THE HARVEST OF VILLAGES 381 

had no meaning. Its houses were very dis- 
tinct, some being but little damaged and some 
of the shade trees still retaining their branches. 
This town nestling in a bowl was not worth the 
expenditure of much ammunition when what the 
Germans wanted to hold and the Anglo-French 
troops to gain was the hills around it. Rancourt 
was the other side of Combles, which explains the 
plum simile. 

The picturesque thing was that the British troops 
were working up on one side of Combles and the 
French on the other side ; and the next morning after 
the British had gathered in some escaping Germans 
who seemed to have lost their way, the blue and 
the khaki met in the main street without indulging 
in formal ceremonies and exchanged a " Good 
morning! " and "Bon jour!" and " Here we are! 
Voyla ! Quee pawnsays-vous ! " and " fa va bien ! 
Oh, yais, I tink so ! " and found big piles of shells 
and other munitions which the Germans could not 
take away and cellars with many wounded who had 
been brought in from the hills — and that was all 
there was to it : a march in and look around, when 
for glory's sake, at least, the victors ought to have 
delivered congratulatory addresses. But tired sol- 
diers will not do that sort of thing. I shall not 
say that they are spoiling pictures for the Salon, 
for there are incidents enough to keep painters 



382 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

going for a thousand years; which ought to be one 
reason for not having a war for another thousand! 

As for Thiepval, the British staff, inconsiderate 
of the correspondents this time — they really were 
not conducting the war for us — did not inform us 
of the attack, being busy those days reaping villages 
and trenches after they were over the Ridge while 
High Visibility had Low Visibility shut up in the 
guardhouse. Besides, the British were so near 
Thiepval as the result of their persistent advances 
that its taking was only another step forward, one 
of savage fighting, however, in the same kind of 
operations that I have described in the chapter on 
" Watching a Charge." The debris beaten into 
dust had been so scattered that one could not tell 
where the village began or ended, but the smudge 
was a symbol to the army no less than to the British 
public — a symbol of the boasted impregnability of 
the first-line German fortifications which had re- 
sisted the attack of July ist — and its capture a re- 
ward of English stubbornness appealing to the race 
which is not unconscious of the characteristic that 
has carried its tongue and dominion over the world. 

Point was given, too, by the enormous dugouts, 
surpassing previous exhibits, capable of holding a 
garrison of a thousand men and a hospital which, 
under the bursts of huge shells of the months 
of British bombardment, had been safe under 



THE HARVEST OF VILLAGES 383^ 

ground. The hospital was equipped with excellent 
medical apparatus as well as anaesthetics manufac- 
tured in Germany, of which the British were some- 
what short. The German battalion that held the 
place had been associated with the work of prepar- 
ing its defenses and were practically either all taken 
prisoner or killed, so far as could be learned. They 
had sworn that they would never lose Thiepval; 
but the deeper the dugouts the farther upstairs men 
inside have to climb in order to get to the door 
before the enemy, who arrives at the threshold as 
the whirlwind barrage lifts. 

As I have said, Thiepval was not on the very 
crest of the Ridge and on the summit the same 
elaborate works had been built to hold this high 
ground. We watched other attacks under curtains 
of fire as the British pressed on. Sometimes we 
could see the Germans moving out in the open from 
their dugouts at the base of the hill in St. Pierre 
Divion and driven to cover as the British guns 
sniped at them with shrapnel. Resistlessly the 
British infantry under its covering barrages kept on 
till the crest and all its dugouts and galleries were 
gained, thus breaking back the old first-line fortifi- 
cations stage by stage and forcing the German into 
the open, where he must dig anew on equal terms. 

The capture of Thiepval did not mean that its 
ruins were to have any rest from shells, for the 



384 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

German guns had their turn. They seemed fond 
of sending up spouts from a little pond in the fore- 
ground, which had no effect except to shower pass- 
ing soldiers with dirty water. However much the 
pond was beaten it was still there ; and I was struck 
by the fact that this was a costly and unsuccessful 
system of drainage for such an efficient people as 
the Germans to apply. 



XXX 

FIVE GENERALS AND VERDUN 

Sixty miles an hour to meet General Joffre — Joffre somewhat like 
Grant — Two figures which France will remember for all 
time — Joffre and Castelnau — Two very old friends — At Verdun 
— What Napoleon and Wellington might have thought — A 
staff whose feet and mind never dragged — The hero of 
Douaumont, General Nivelle — Simplicity — Men who believe in 
giving blows — A true soldier — A prized photograph of Joffre — 
The drama of Douaumont— General Mangin, corps com- 
mander at Verdun — An eye that said " Attack ! " — A five- 
o'clock-in-the-morning corps — The old fortress town, Verdun — 
The effort of Colossus — Germany's high water mark — Thrifty 
fighters, the French — Germany good enough to win against 
Rumania, but not at Verdun. 

That spirited friend Lieutenant T., at home in an 
English or a French mess or walking arm-in-arm 
with the poitus of his old battalion, required quick 
stepping to keep up with him when we were not in 
his devil of a motor car that carried me on a flying 
visit to the French lines before I started for home 
and did not fail even when sixty miles an hour were 
required to keep the appointment with General 
Joffre — which we did, to the minute. 

Many people have told of sitting across the table 
in his private office from the victor of the Marne; 
and it was when he was seated and began to talk 

385 



386 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

that you appreciated the power of the man, with 
his great head and its mass of white hair and the 
calm, largely-molded features, who could give his 
orders when the fate of France was at stake and 
then retire to rest for the night knowing that his 
part was done for the day and the rest was with 
the army. In common with all men when experi- 
ence and responsibility have ripened their talents, 
though lacking in the gift of formal speech-making, 
as Grant was, he could talk well, in clear sentences, 
whose mold was set by precise thought, which 
brought with it the eloquence that gains its point. 
It was more than personality, in this instance, that 
had appeal. He was the personification of a great 
national era. 

In view of changes which were to come, another 
glimpse that I had of him in the French headquar- 
ters town which was not by appointment is peculiarly 
memorable. When I was out strolling I saw on 
the other side of the street two figures which all 
France knew and will know for all time. What- 
ever vicissitudes of politics, whatever campaigns 
ensue, whatever changes come in the world after 
the war, Joffre's victory at the Marne and Castel- 
nau's victory in Lorraine, which was its complement 
in masterly tactics, make their niches in the national 
Pantheon secure. 

The two old friends, comrades of army life long 



FIVE GENERALS AND VERDUN 387 

before fame came to them one summer month, 
Commander-in-Chief and Chief of Staff, were tak- 
ing their regular afternoon promenade — Joffre in 
his familiar short, black coat which made his figure 
the burlier, his walk affected by the rheumatism in 
his legs, though he certainly had no rheumatism 
in his head, and Castelnau erect and slight of figure, 
his slimness heightened by his long, blue overcoat 
— chatting as they walked slowly, and behind them 
followed a sturdy guard in plain clothes at a distance 
of a few paces, carrying two cushions. Joffre 
stopped and turned with a " you-don't-say-so " ges- 
ture and a toss of his head at something that Cas- 
telnau had told him. 

Very likely they were not talking of the war; 
indeed, most likely it was about friends in their army 
world, for both have a good wit, a keen and amia- 
ble understanding of human nature. At all events, 
they were enjoying themselves. So they passed on 
into the woods, followed by the guard who would 
place their cushions on their favorite seat, and the 
two who had been lieutenants and captains and 
colonels together would continue their airing and 
their chat until they returned to the business of di- 
recting their millions of men. 

It was raining in this darkened French village near 
Verdun and a passing battalion went dripping by, 



388 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

automobiles sent out sprays of muddy water from 
their tires, and over in the crowded inclosures the 
German prisoners taken at Douaumont stood in 
the mud waiting to be entrained. Occasionally a sol- 
dier or an officer came out of a doorway that sent 
forth a stream of light, and upstairs in the municipal 
building where we went to pay our respects to the 
general commanding the army that had won the 
victory which had thrilled France as none had since 
the Marne, we found that it was the regular hour 
for his staff to report. They reported standing in 
the midst of tables and maps and standing received 
their orders. In future, when I see the big room 
with its mahogany table and fat armchairs reserved 
for directors' meetings I shall recall equally impor- 
tant conferences in the affairs of a nation that were 
held under simpler auspices. 

This conference seemed in keeping with the 
atmosphere of the place : nobody in any flurry of 
haste and nobody wasting time. One after another 
the officers reported; and whatever their ages, for 
some would have seemed young for great responsi- 
bilities two years before, they were men going about 
their business alert, self-possessed, reflective of the 
character of their leader as staffs always are, men 
whose feet and whose minds never dragged. When 
they spoke to anybody politeness was the lubricant 
of prompt exchange of thought, a noiseless, eight- 



FIVE GENERALS AND VERDUN 389 

cylinder, hundred-horse-power sort of staff. If the 
little Corsican could have looked on, if he could 
have seen the taking of Douaumont, or if Welling- 
ton could have seen the taking of the Ridge, I think 
that they would have been well satisfied — and some- 
what jealous to find that military talent was so 
widespread. 

The man who came out of the staff-room would 
have won his marshal's baton in Napoleon's day, I 
suppose, though he was out of keeping with those 
showy times. I did not then know that he was to 
be Commander-in-Chief; only that all France 
thrilled with his name, which time will forever as- 
sociate with Douaumont. At once you felt the 
dynamic quality under his agreeable manner and 
knew that General Nivelle did things swiftly and 
quietly, without wasteful expenditure of reserve 
force, which he could call upon when needed by 
turning on the current. 

There was a stranger come to call; it was a rainy 
night; we had better not drive back to the hotel at 
Bar-le-Duc, he suggested, but find a billet in town, 
which was hospitality not to be imposed upon when 
one could see how limited quarters were in this 
small village. Some day I suppose a plaque will be 
put up on the door of that small house, with its 
narrow hall and plain hat-rack and the sitting-room 
turned into a dining-room, saying that General 



390 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

(perhaps it will be Marshal) Nivelle lived here 
during the battle of Verdun. It is a fine gift, sim- 
plicity. Some great men, or those who are called 
great, lack it; but nothing is so attractive in any 
man. No sentry at the door, no servant to open it. 
You simply went in, hung up your cap and took off 
your raincoat> 

Hundreds of staffs were sitting down to the same 
kind of dinner with a choice of red or white wine 
and the menu was that of an average French house- 
hold. I recall this and other staff dinners, in con- 
trast to costly plate and rich food in a house where 
a gold Croesus with diamond eyes and necklace 
should have been on the mantelpiece as the house- 
hold god, with the thought that even war is a good 
thing if it centers ambition on objects other than 
individual gain. Without knowing it, Joffre, Castel- 
nau, Foch, Petain, Nivelle and others were the 
richest men in France. 

A colonel when the war began, in the sifting by 
Father Joffre to find real leaders by the criterion 
of success General Nivelle had risen to command 
an army. Wherever he was in charge he got the 
upper hand of the enemy. All that he and his 
officers said reflected one spirit — that of the offen- 
sive. They were men who believed in giving blows. 
A nation looking for a man who could win victories 
said, " Here he is ! " when its people read the 



FIVE GENERALS AND VERDUN 391 

communique about Douaumont one morning. He 
had been going his way, doing the tasks in hand 
according to his own method, and at one of the 
stations fame found him. Soldiers have their 
philosophy and these days when it includes fame, 
probably fame never comes. This time it came to 
a soldier without any of the showy qualities that 
fame used to prefer, one who, I should say, was 
quite unaffected by it owing to a greater interest in 
his work; a man without powerful influence to urge 
his promotion. If you had met him before the war 
he would have impressed you with his kindly fea- 
tures, well-shaped head and vitality, and if you 
know soldiers you would have known that he was 
highly trained in his profession. His staff was a 
family, but the kind of family where every member 
has telepathic connection with its head; I could not 
imagine that any officer who had not would be at 
home in the little dining-room. Readiness of per- 
ception and quickness of action in intelligent obedi- 
ence were inherent. 

Over in his office in the municipal building where 
we went after dinner the general took something 
wrapped in tissue paper out of a drawer and from 
his manner, had he been a collector, I should have 
known that it was some rare treasure. When he 
undid the paper I saw a photograph of General 



392 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

Joffre autographed with a sentiment for the occa- 
sion. 

" He gave it to me for Douaumont! " said Gen- 
eral Nivelle, a touch of pride in his voice — the only- 
sign of pride that I noticed. 

There spoke the soldier to whom praise from his 
chief was the best praise and more valued than any 
other encomium. 

When I spoke of Douaumont he drew out the 
map and showed me his order of the day, which 
had a soldierly brevity that made words keen-edged 
tools. The attacking force rushed up overnight 
and appeared as a regulated tidal wave of men, 
their pace timed under cover of curtains of fire 
which they hugged close, then over the German 
trenches and on into the fort. Six thousand pris- 
oners and forty-five hundred French casualties! It 
was this dramatic, this complete and unequivocal 
success that had captured the imagination of France, 
but he was not dramatic in telling it. He made it 
a military evolution on a piece of paper; though 
when he put his pencil down on Douaumont and 
held it fast there for a moment, saying, " And that 
is all for the present ! " the pencil seemed to turn 
into steel. 

All for the present! And the future? That of 
the army of France was to be in his hands. He 



FIVE GENERALS AND VERDUN 393 

had the supreme task. He would approach it as he 
had approached all other tasks. 

You had only to look at General Mangin com- 
manding the corps before Verdun to know that at- 
tack was not alone a system but a gospel with him. 
Five stripes on his arm for wounds, all won in 
colonial work, sun-browned, swart, with a strong, 
abutting chin which might have been a fit point for 
Nivelle's pencil, an eye that said "Attack!" and 
could twinkle with the wisdom of many campaigns ! 

" General Joffre sat in that chair two hours be- 
fore the advance," he said, with the same respectful 
awe that other generals had exhibited toward the 
Commander-in-Chief. 

The time had come for the old leader, grown 
weary, to go; for the younger men of the school 
which the war has produced, with its curtains of 
fire and wave attacks, to take his place. But the 
younger ones in the confidence of their system could 
look on the old leader while he lived as the great, 
indomitable figure of the critical stages of the war. 

A man of iron, Mangin, with a breadth of chest 
in keeping with his chin, who could bear the strain 
of command which had brought down many gen- 
erals from sheer physical incapacity. Month after 
month this chin had stood out against German 
drives, all the while wanting to be in its natural eie- 



394 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

ment of the offensive. His resolute, outright solu- 
tion of problems by human ratios would fit him into 
any age or any climate. He was at home leading 
a punitive expedition or in the complicated business 
of Verdun. Whether he was using a broadsword 
or a curtain of fire he proposed to strike his enemy 
early and hard and keep on striking. In the course 
of talking with him I spoke of the contention that in 
some cases in modern war men could be too brave. 

" Rarely! " he replied, a single word which had 
the emphasis of both that jaw and that shrewd, 
piercing eye. 

" What is the best time to go out to the front? " 
I asked the general. 

" Five o'clock in the morning! " 

The officer who escorted me did not think any- 
thing of getting up at that hour. Mangin's is a five- 
o'clock-in-the-morning corps. 

Shall I describe that town on the banks of the 
Meuse which has been described many times? Or 
that citadel built by Vauban, with dynamos and 
electric light in its underground chambers and pas- 
sages, its hospitals, shops, stores and barrack room, 
so safe under its walls and roof of masonry that the 
Germans presciently did not waste their shells on it 
but turned them with particular vengeance on the 
picturesque old houses along the river bank, neglect- 
ing the barracks purposely in view of their useful- 



FIVE GENERALS AND VERDUN 395 

ness to the conquerors when Mecca was theirs. 
There must be something sacred to a Frenchman in 
the citadel which held life secure and in the ruins 
which bore their share of the blows upon this old 
fortress town in the lap of the hills, looking out 
toward hills which had been the real defense. 

Interest quickened on the way to the Verdun 
front as you came to the slopes covered with torn 
and fallen trees, where the Germans laid their far- 
reaching curtains of fire to catch the French reserves 
struggling through mud and shell-craters on those 
February and March days to the relief of the front 
line. Only when you have known the life of an 
army in action in winter in such a climate can you 
appreciate the will that drove men forward to the 
attack and the will of the defenders against out- 
numbering guns, having to yield, point by point, 
with shrewd thrift, small bands of men in exposed 
places making desperate resistance against torrents 
of shells. 

Verdun was German valor at its best and German 
gunnery at its mightiest, the effort of Colossus shut 
in a ring of steel to force a decision; and the high- 
water mark of German persistence was where you 
stood on the edge of the area of mounds that shells 
had heaped and craters that shells had scooped by 
the concentration of fire on Fort Souville. A few 
Germans in the charge reached here, but none re- 



396 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

turned. The survivors entered Verdun, the French 
will tell you with a shrug, as prisoners. Down the 
bare slope with its dead grass blotched by craters the 
eye travels and then up another slope to a crest which 
you see as a cumulus of shell-tossed earth under an 
occasional shell-burst. That is Douaumont, whose 
taking cost the Germans such prolonged and bloody 
effort and aroused the Kaiser to a florid outburst of 
laudation of his Brandenburgers who, by its cap- 
ture, had, as Germany then thought, brought France 
to her death-gasp. 

On that hill German prestige and system reached 
their zenith ; and the answer eight months later was 
French elan which, in two hours, with the swiftness 
and instinctive cohesion of democracy drilled and 
embattled and asking no spur from an autocrat, 
swept the Germans off the summit. From other 
charges I could visualize the precise and spirited 
movement of those blue figures under waves of shell 
fire in an attack which was the triumphant example 
of the latest style of offensive against frontal posi- 
tions. There was no Kaiser to burst into rhetoric to 
thank General Nivelle, who had his reward in an 
autographed photograph from Father Joffre; and 
the men of that charge had theirs in the gratitude 
of a people. 

Fort Vaux, on another crest at the right, was still 
in German hands, but that, too, was to be regained 



FIVE GENERALS AND VERDUN 397 

with the next rush. Yes, it was good to be at Ver- 
dun after Douaumont had been retaken, standing 
where you would have been in range of a German 
sniper a week before. Turning as on a pivot, you 
could identify through the glasses all the positions 
whose names are engraved on the French mind. 
Not high these circling hills, the keystone of a mili- 
tary arch, but taken together it was clear how, in this 
as in other wars, they were nature's bastion at the 
edge of the plain that lay a misty line in the dis- 
tance. 

Either in front or to the rear of Souville toward 
Verdun the surprising thing was how few soldiers 
you saw and how little transport within range of 
German guns ; which impressed you with the elastic 
system of the French, who are there and are not 
there. Let an attack by the Germans develop and 
soldiers would spring out of the earth and the 
valleys echo with the thunder of guns. A thrifty 
people, the French. 

When studying those hills that had seen the great- 
est German offensive after I had seen the offen- 
sive on the Somme, I thought of all that the summer 
had meant on the Western front, beginning with 
Douaumont lost and ending with Douaumont re- 
gained and the sweep over the conquered Ridge ; and 
I thought of another general, Sir Douglas Haig, 
who had had to train his legions, begin with bricks 



398 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

and mortar to make a house under shell fire and, 
day by day, with his confidence in " the spirit that 
quickeneth " as the great asset, had wrought with 
patient, far-seeing skill a force in being which had 
never ceased attacking and drawing in German 
divisions to hold the line that those German divisions 
were meant to break. 

Von Falkenhayn was gone from power; the 
Crown Prince who thirsted for war had had his fill 
and said that war was an " idiocy." It was the 
sentiment of the German trenches which put von 
Falkenhayn out; the silent ballots of that most sensi- 
tive of all public opinion, casting its votes with the 
degree of its disposition to stand fire, which no 
officer can control by mere orders. 

With the Verdun offensive over, the German sol- 
diers struggling on the Ridge had a revelation which 
was translated into a feeling that censorship could 
not stifle of the failure of the campaign to crush 
France. They called for the man who had won 
victories and the Kaiser gave them von Hindenburg, 
whom fortune favored when he sent armies inspir- 
ited by his leadership against amateur soldiers in 
veteran confidence, while the weather had stopped 
the Allied offensive in the West. 

Imagine Lee's men returning from Gettysburg 
to be confronted by inexperienced home militia and 
their cry, " The Yanks have given us a rough time 



FIVE GENERALS AND VERDUN 399 

of it, but you fellows get out of the way! " Such 
was the feeling of that German Army as it went 
southward; not the army that it was, but quite 
good enough an army to win against Rumania with 
the system that had failed at Verdun. 



XXXI 

AU REVOIR, SOMME ! 

Sir Douglas Haig — Atmosphere at headquarters something of 
Oxford and of Scotland — Sir Henry Rawlinson — " Degum- 
ming " the inefficient — Back on the Ridge again — The last shell- 
burst — Good-bye to the mess — The fellow war-correspondents 
— Bon voyage. 

The fifth of the great attacks, which was to break 
in more of the old first-line fortifications, taking 
Beaumont-Hamel and other villages, was being de- 
layed by Brother Low Visibility, who had been hav- 
ing his innings in rainy October and early Novem- 
ber, when the time came for me to say good-byes 
and start homeward. 

Sir Douglas Haig had been as some invisible com- 
mander who was omnipresent in his forceful control 
of vast forces. His disinclination for reviews or 
display was in keeping with his nature and his con- 
ception of his task. The army had glimpses of him 
going and coming in his car and observers saw him 
entering or leaving an army or a corps headquarters, 
his strong, calm features expressive of confidence 
and resolution. 

There were many instances of his fine sensitive- 
ness, his quick decisions, his Scotch phrases which 

400 



A U REVOIR, SOMME ! 40 1 

could strip a situation bare of non-essentials. It 
was good that a man with his culture and charm 
could have the qualities of a great commander. In 
the chateau which was his Somme headquarters 
where final plans were made, the final word given 
which put each issue to the test, the atmosphere 
had something of Oxford and of Scotland and of 
the British regular army, and everything seemed 
done by a routine that ran so smoothly that the ap- 
pearance of routine was concealed. 

Here he had said to me early in the offensive 
that he wanted me to have freedom of observation 
and to criticise as I chose, and he trusted me not 
to give military information to the enemy. When 
I went to take my leave and thank him for his cour- 
tesies the army that he had drilled had received the 
schooling of battle and tasted victory. How great 
his task had been only a soldier could appreciate, 
and only history can do justice to the courage that 
took the Ridge or the part that it had played in the 
war. 

Upstairs in a small room of another chateau the 
Commander-in-Chief and the Commander of the 
Fourth of the group of armies under Sir Douglas — 
who had played polo together in India as subalterns, 
Sir Henry Rawlinson being still as much of a 
Guardsman as Sir Douglas was a Scot — had held 
many conferences. Sir Henry could talk sound 



402 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

soldierly sense about the results gained and look 
forward, as did the whole army, to next summer 
when the maximum of skill and power should be at- 
tained. In common with Nivelle, both were leaders 
who had earned their way in battle, which was pro- 
moting the efficient and shelving or " degumming," 
in the army phrase, the inefficient. Every week, 
every day, I might say, the new army organization 
had tightened. 

With steel helmet on and gas mask over the 
shoulder for the last time, I had a final promenade 
up to the Ridge, past the guns and Mouquet Farm, 
picking my way among the shell-craters and other 
grisly reminders of the torment that the fighters 
had endured to a point where I could look out over 
the fields toward Bapaume. For eight and ten miles 
the way had been blazed free of the enemy by 
successive attacks. Five hundred yards ahead 
" krumps " splashing the soft earth told where the 
front line was and around me was the desert which 
such pounding had created, with no one in the imme- 
diate neighborhood except some artillery officers 
hugging a depression and spotting the fall of shells 
from their guns just short of Bapaume and calling 
out the results by telephone, over one of the strands 
of the spider's web of intelligence which they had 
unrolled from a reel when they came. I joined 
them for a few minutes in their retreat below the 



AU REVOIR, SOMME! 403 

skyline and listened to their remarks about Brother 
Low Visibility, who soon was to have the world for 
his own in winter mists, rain and snow, limiting the 
army's operations by his perversity until spring 
came. 

And so back, as the diarists say, by the grassless 
and blasted route over which I had come. After I 
was in the car I heard one of the wicked screams 
with its unpleasant premonition, which came to an 
end by whipping out a ball of angry black smoke 
short of a nearby howitzer, which was the last shell- 
burst that I saw. 

Good-bye, too, to my English comrades in a group 
at the doorway: to Robinson with his poise, his 
mellowness, his wisdom, his well-balanced sentences, 
who had seen the world around from mining camps 
of the west to Serbian refugee camps; to "our 
Gibbs," ever sweet-tempered, writing his heart out 
every night in the human wonder of all he saw in 
burning sentences that came crowding to his pencil- 
point which raced on till he was exhausted, though 
he always revived at dinner to undertake any con- 
troversy on behalf of a better future for the whole 
human race ; to blithesome Thomas who will never 
grow up, making words dance a tune, quoting 
Horace in order to forget the shells, all himself 
with his coat off and swinging a peasant's scythe; to 
Philips the urbane, not saying much but coming to 



404 MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR 

the essential point, our scout and cartographer, who 
knew all the places on the map between the Somme 
and the Rhine and heard the call of Pittsburgh; to 
Russell, that pragmatic, upstanding expert in squad- 
rons and barrages, who saved all our faces as re- 
porters by knowing news when he saw it, arbiter of 
mess conversations, whose pungent wit had a mov- 
able zero — luck to them all! May Robinson have 
a stately mansion on the Thames where he can study 
nature at leisure; Gibbs never want for something 
to write about; Thomas have six crops of hay a 
year to mow and a garden with a different kind of 
bird nesting in every tree ; Philips a new pipe every 
day and a private yacht sailing on an ocean of maps; 
Russell a home by the sea where he can watch the 
ships come in — when the war is over. 

It happened that High Visibility had slightly the 
upper hand over his gloomy brother the day they 
bade me bon voyage. My last glimpse of the ca- 
thedral showed it clear against the sky; and ahead 
many miles of rich, familiar landscape of Picardy 
and Artois were to unfold before I took the cross- 
channel steamer. I knew that I had felt the epic 
touch of great events. 

THE END 



W @3 











«1% *b 4? 

** ° J < 

o . * « .1 

v 

%£. ^** *^ 










0» M - *>i 






* <G Y 
















^ .<# 




3 ^ .^wr* ,av *** 



^ v *v • 









■/ ^ 



- % 

- | Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 

^ u ^ « \ Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
O **'^Sfl5*V o ^ * Treatment Date: J UN 2001 

\^ , • • .. % ** " °J> .^U, % PreservationTechnoSogie 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Paik Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
-,„. „ ^ (724)779-2111 

^>3 vP» . Br 




.- Xs* 



\V % J 



" %> A 




** v % 



»bv* 






V * e « o ° A** 



°c 



* ^v 























c 



V 



** ** - 



v*V 












• ^ 



\—-y .... v^>* ^'^^v \ 

> °-^f^** jj? s V %^K ? *° ****** 

V\^RT 
BOOKBINDING 




